REVIEWS IN BRIEF: AUGUST, 2015

I mentioned some while back that going forward, there were going to be a lot of shorter reviews popping up, and going forward, I hope to make these posts happen weekly - biweekly for sure. But it's been a bad month for watching things, so this first capsule review round-up is going to stand instead as the collection of all the things I watched in the month of August that I thought I wanted to talk about in some capacity. Bonus: this means, now and in the future, that I'm going to review classic movies that happen to cross my transom that would otherwise never make it to the blog.

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A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Contemplating Existence (Andersson, 2014)

Just like that other Anderson from the United States, there's not point in denying that Roy Andersson tends to make films that resemble each other, and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, his Leone d'Oro winner from the 2014 Venice Film Festival, does pretty much exactly the same things as 2000's Songs from the Second Floor and 2006's You, the Living, and it it does them in pretty much exactly the same way. Long takes of barely-moving scenes, sudden eruptions of po-faced absurdism, and the whole thing would be suicidally depressing if it the comic timing weren't flawless. Third verse, same as the first.

Or is it? Whether I'm just starting to feel diminishing returns, or whether Andersson is slowly running out of inspiration, the one clear difference between Pigeon and its two forerunners in his trilogy of modern life is that it's not as good as they are. Which is a very different thing than saying it's not good, period, and I laughed heartily, many times, throughout the film, and was then cut off cold, many times, by the mordant shifts in perspective and tone. It's virtually impossible to imagine anyone who responded to the other films not liking this one at all, or even liking this one a whole lot. But comparatively, it lacks the passionate fire they possessed in such quantity; there are many handfuls individual shots and gags I could recite in loving detail from the first two movies, but the scene from Pigeon that lives strongest in my memory does not do so because I admire it the most (though a repeating motif involving 18th Century King Karl XII of Sweden, played by Viktor Gyllenberg, imposing upon the confused patrons of a rundown portside bar in the 2010s does give me enormous pleasure as I roll it around in my head).

Still, if we free it from the tyranny of having to live up to the standards of two of the most brilliant, idiosyncratic comedies of the 2000s, Pigeon is a fine piece of work on its own merits. The crawling pace of the static long shots - which are frequently exteriors or otherwise not beholden to the "this is a shadowbox in a room" staging of the earlier films, and that gives things a nice sense of sprawl - is absolutely perfect in establishing the film's erratic humor, and telling us how to appreciate it: first you're confused, then you're repulsed, and eventually the stiff stillness becomes hilarious. Or it doesn't. This is, beyond doubt, the kind of material that appeals to a very particular audience, and I think Songs from the Second Floor is absolutely more immediately winning, but there's no doubt that this is a thoroughly enjoyable experience for folks as what like morbid humor based in the pasty-faced frigidity of both people and their actions.

8/10

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A Star Is Born (Pierson, 1976)

Two terrific versions of the highly melodramatic story A Star Is Born - three if you count the original 1932 What Price Hollywood? (as you absolutely should), the same material in all but name - was perhaps already pushing it, but least the 1976 incarnation of the story tries to freshen the material by changing the setting from the movie industry to pop music. That doesn't entirely work out in practice, owing to the differences in image management between classical Hollywood and the '70s music industry, and it's only the least of the problems that brings the movie down to its knees.

One can have heard rumors and mutterings for years, as I had, that the '76 Star Is Born is nothing but a colossal ego trip for star-producer Barbra Streisand (who won the film's only Oscar, for the gooey love ballad "Evergreen", co-written by Paul Williams), but it's impossible to be prepared for how all-encompassingly dreadful a movie it is. It's not simply that the screenplay, assembled by too many cooks who clearly didn't work in the same kitchen, sacrifices its dramatic integrity in favor of giving Streisand one moment after another to show off. Though it's not possible to have enough favorable feelings for the star nor her vehicle to excuse the grotesqueness of extending the sodden 139-minute film's ending by a good quarter of an hour beyond its natural stopping point just to facilitate a showstopping solo number at the end.

But really, everything about the movie, save perhaps for its nifty grit-soaked concert-doc cinematography (by Robert Surtees, Oscar-nominated), is just embarrassing hackwork. Kris Kristofferson, cast as the third wheel in the love story between Streisand and herself, ambles in like a guy who figures that you'll buy him a beer if he has a relaxing enough smile, while the rest of the cast shuffle around in the background; the luckier ones get to furrow their brows and look sad at the thought of Kristofferson's drinking. Occasionally, a pair of African-American backup singers materialise to give the film a jolt of incongruous lazy racism. As a work of craft, the film begins and ends with Surtees; the '70s fashions are charmingly dated, but still more campy than anything, and the less said about the raw editing in some of the singing scenes, the better.

No, the film lives and dies on Streisand's talent, which is of course considerable, but sabotaging the drama to get us there is hardly worthy of anybody's time or energy, hers least of all. I would at this point name some of the films to better show off her iconic vocal powers, her loopy screen presence and comic timing, or her gift for turning woundedness into lashing anger, but it would take too long: all of Streisand's films are better showcases than this, even the most overt vanity projects. And yes, I have seen The Mirror Has Two Faces.

3/10

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Fantastic Voyage (Fleischer, 1966)

One of the last big sci-fi pictures before 2001: A Space Odyssey came along and fundamentally changed the possibilities of the genre, 1966's Fantastic Voyage is the platonic ideal of a movie that gets praised, sincerely, for its visual effects, by someone whose tone of voice and inability to maintain eye contact make it clear that they hope you don't ask about anything else. Because it feels bad to attack the movie: the visual effects are really good, even if they were supplanted and then lapped within a few years of its release. And how much nicer to have those kind of top-drawer visual effects in a movie about interesting concepts and adult characters, and not one that involves giant robots walloping the shit out of each other.

Still, you can't get too far into the film before you have to admit that for all its achievements, and the very real charm of mid-'60s sci-fi (notwithstanding the vast budget gap, the film more than slightly resembles TV's Star Trek, from the same year), Fantastic Voyage is a fucking slog. It shouldn't be: the hook is terrific. Both the U.S. and the USSR have developed miniaturisation technology, but only the Americans have a scientist who knows how to make the process last for more than an hour. And he's been almost fatally shot, and sent into a coma that can only be cured by shrinking down brain surgeon Dr. Duval (Arthur Kennedy), his assistant Cora Peterson (Raquel Welch), Dr. Michaels (Donald Pleasance), and sub captain Bill Owens (William Redfield), and injecting them and their microscopic submarine right into the scientist's body, with government agent Grant (Stephen Boyd), along for manly protagonist duties, trying to catch Duval in the act of being a Commie spy.

That certainly ought to be a fantastic voyage, and if you've encountered the story in Isaac Asimov's novelisation, you even know that it kind of can be (Asimov demanded permission to re-work the story to make it less idiotic). But Henry Kleiner's screenplay and Richard Fleischer's direction show off all the seams and plot holes while pushing the plot along as slowly as a nominal adventure movie could possibly support. The sub voyage takes place in something longer than real time, during which the plot plonks along through a repetitive cycle of theoretically tense moments flattened by lifeless direction. Every actor who isn't Pleasance stands around being vastly too serious, and sometimes we are given blessed relief in the form of the production designers' florid, psychedelia-tinged vision of the inside of the human body.

It looks great - there will be those who carp about how dated it is (and, sure, it is), but really is quite a special visual experience. Tragically, behind those visuals, it's bloated B-movie nonsense built around false characters, expanded and perpetrated by people who didn't know how to capture the proper spunk and speed of a good piece of junk sci-fi.

5/10

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The End of the Tour (Ponsoldt, 2015)

Far be it from me to tell the nearest and dearest friends and survivors of David Foster Wallace, a great many of whom have said some pretty withering things about the beatifying biopic-in-miniature The End of the Tour, that they're wrong. There's something squishy and off-putting about the film just in relationship to itself, and the way it treats its version of Wallace (Jason Segel) as a soul too gentle for this cynical, cold world - literally, the film is set in the Midwestern winter - while constantly foreshadowing his suicide 12 years later. There's a distinct, appalling thread of "come laugh at the homey wisdom of Your Literary Idol®, and then cry to remember that he's dead" that runs through the whole thing.

And yet I find myself not only not-hating the film, but even admiring bits and pieces of it, though probably not the bits that the filmmakers wanted. Frankly, I found Segel's Wallace to be all mimicry (good mimicry) with limited willingness to let us inside - and this is, to be fair, much more a function of Donald Margulies's script, which presents the author as an enigma and a concept in the first hour, than it's a sign of Segel's limits as an actor - with not nearly enough thought behind his eyes. The movie depicts Wallace, but it's terrified as hell at grappling with him.

Instead, the real protagonist and by far the deeper, more thoughtfully played character, is minor novelist David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg), assigned by Rolling Stone to interview Wallace near the end of the promotional tour for the author's 1996 novel Infinite Jest. Eisenberg performance isn't as "revelatory" as Segel's, I guess - the doubt-ridden, antagonistic urban Jewish figure he plays here is securely in his wheelhouse - but it's far more expansive and tricky, full of threads that aren't quite in the script, allowing his version of Lipsky (whose story was never finished and ultimately turned into the 2010 book, Although of Course You End Up Meeting Yourself, that this film is adapted from) to be sufficiently resentful under the starry-eyed nervousness and awe that the film's lurch towards an interpersonal conflict as it goes along feels like a natural outgrowth rather than an imposition. It ends being, Amadeus-style, better as the story of an average man admiring and fearing a genius, than as the story of that genius itself, and it's easily Eisenberg's best work since The Social Network.

Stylistically, it's wholly undistinguished American indie filmmaking of a sort that has been unchanged in all particulars since sometime in the 1990s; director James Ponsoldt is clearly more interested in presenting his characters than in doing anything to frame them cinematically. A literary approach certainly fits the material, but the lack of aesthetic challenge is exactly the problem: all the film wants to do is gawk at Wallace/Segel, not engage with him, and the result is often more trivial than penetrating.

6/10

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: WATCHING OTHER PEOPLE PLAY VIDEO GAMES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I'M WITH THE BAND

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

Almost Famous of the year 2000 is surely the Cameron Crowest of Cameron Crowe films. Not just because it’s also the most baldly autobiographical of Cameron Crowe films, though I suspect that fact informs everything else that is true of the film. There’s a strong current of observed reality suffusing it; there’s a wealth of detail in the way people talk and think within the movie, the attitudes they hold and the society in which they move that has a rich, thick feeling of authenticity. Crowe’s screenplay and his direction mix finely-honed reporting skills (it is, after all, about a time in his life when he was a journalist) with an unapologetic lacquer of happy nostalgia, looking back to a time that was neither more innocent nor more promising but keenly remembering what it felt like to think that everything was innocent and promising. And because of all this, it is a film that treats all of its characters as wonderful old friends, people to be forgiven all their mistakes and celebrated for even their smallest triumphs. It is, as much as anything else I can name, a movie that loves its characters with the most ebullient love, each and every single one of them, even when they’re acting at their worst: it is the most generous kind of storytelling, and that is Crowe’s strongest and most characteristic mode.

Whether this is an entirely good thing isn’t clear. Without Almost Famous, it’s quite impossible to imagine Elizabethtown, a film of almost radioactive sweetness and guileless affection for its characters and scenario - I film whose absolute refusal to judge or show even the tiniest measure of cynicism I find awfully endearing, though in the most artless and barbarically clumsy way. Almost Famous isn’t that: it’s a far steadier and more thoughtful piece of filmmaking (I would suggest that it is, in fact, the clear high water mark of Crowe’s CV), if only for the nuance of the way it uses its wall-to-wall classic rock soundtrack as a signpost for character development, rather than the crude nostalgia-baiting of most films that rely on music to do the heavy lifting of authenticating a time period and insisting on the audience’s feelings (Forrest Gump, you shameless hussy).

Is it, though, a gloppy wad of sentimentality? Maybe. Kind of. There is a fine needle to thread here, and not at all moments does Almost Famous thread it - for every scene that's a sturdy piece of observed wisdom about coming of age as a human male, a critical thinker, and a lover of the transporting power of music, there's another that's pure cheese. There are moments that are both of these things at once, including what I'm inclined to think of as the movie's signature scene and probably my favorite moment in all of Crowe: a bus full of tired rockstars, groupies, and teenage journalists joining in, one by one, to sing along to Elton John's "Tiny Dancer". It's hokey and sweet and honest, aggressive and demanding in its appeal to the naïve belief that a song has that kind of unifying, uplifting power. Which of course it does: there are probably not many things that every single adult in the developed world has experienced, but I'm willing to bet that a pleasant sing-along with friends is one of them.

Whatever universal feeling come out of the film are generated from one of the most thoroughly specific scenarios ever to support a coming-of-age film: riffing on Crowe's own life experience, Almost Famous centers on the weeks in 1973 that 15-year-old William Miller (Patrick Fugit) spent touring with the fictional band Stillwater after having lucked (and lied) his way into an assignment to write a 3000-word story about the band for Rolling Stone. The minimal plot that follows finds him swooning with fannish delight at the band's soulful leader guiatarist, Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup), with only his good sense for journalism leading him to discover that even very good-natured people can be selfish users and egocentrists. But mostly, it's a hangout movie, in which a slice of early-'70s rock culture parades by a guileless kid and reveal some measure of themselves to him. And this is where the writer-director's peaceable humanism explodes, showing a deep forgiveness and affection for his characters, who even at their shittiest are never really judged by the movie (Jason Lee as generally irritated singer Jeff Bebe is the closest the film has to a spoilsport, and even he never seems particularly unreasonable). There's also the quiet-unto-laconic performances he teases out of a cast that seems even more impressive 15 years on than it did in 2000, when people like Zooey Deschanel, Jay Baruchel, Rainn Wilson have turned into, if not household names, at least That Guys of the first order. These are reasonable, soft people, with even the angriest ones - Lee, Frances McDormand as William's overprotective mother who constantly caves into him to avoid driving him off - tending towards smallish, level-head demonstrations of rage and impatience.

The film tries to do two things at once: present these people as 15-year-old William/Crowe would have seen them (thus the firebreathing but always comforting mother, or the spectral presentation of Kate Hudson's breakthrough role of Penny Lane, teenage earth mother and philosophical groupie who represents exactly the kind of world-altering Feminine Life Force that Crowe would later turn into a hollow nightmare with Elizabethtown, the film for which critic Nathan Rabin coined the term "Manic Pixie Dream Girl", only in this case always distinctly too aware of how the boy hero sees her to get within her grasp), and also as fortysomething Crowe, far smarter than his teenage alter-ego, understands them to actually be. Generally speaking, Almost Famous is best when it keeps this perfectly balanced, or errs on the side of adult wisdom; too much youthful innocence is bad for the teeth. It's probably why all of the film's best moments after the "Tiny Dancer" scene are the handful of appearances of Philip Seymour Hoffman as rock writing god Lester Bangs, giving what I think can be uncontroversially counted as the film's clear standout performance, not least because he's the only character who plainly knows more than William in every one of his appearances. When he drops his prickly, sometimes antagonist nuggets of wisdom, Hoffman represents the exact kind of clear-eyed, brutally unromantic perspective that the whole arc of Almost Famous generally moves towards, but he does it without sacrificing Crowe's basic decency. The iconic "we're uncool" scene gets to be iconic in no small part because of Hoffman's rich friendliness in delivering blunt truths, sugarcoating nothing from a position of complete respect and love: the closest the film comes to openly having Adult Crowe sit Boy Crowe down and explain what the next 27 years are going to bring.

This register of clarity saves the film from its indulgences (which include a 162-minute director's cut that transparently wants nothing more than to add time for Crowe to linger with the characters and music he loves; an even more generous, humanist statement than the 122-minute theatrical version, but it's here that we really take the exit ramp to Elizabethtown), which certainly include the generalised Baby Boomer conviction that this particular music really mattered; every generation believes that of their music, of course, and every generation is equally wrong, but 1973 is right at the end of the era that the media at large has generally been willing to play along with (full disclosure: I'm actually a huge fan of all the music on this film's soundtrack - I can only imagine how enervating it must be to anyone who can't claim the same thing - but I was born late enough for the Boomers to have already revealed themselves to be full of shit). And the uncritical attention given to the beatific, hushed expressions of late-hippie thought (but what isn't given uncritical attention in Almost Famous?) does leave the film a little stranded in its writer's reveries.

There's always something to pull it back (and that's actually the shape of William's development throughout the movie: be captivated by indulgence, then pull back; so perhaps it's meant ironically): the steady drumbeat editing by Joe Hutshing and Saar Klein, the crisp and uncharacteristically domesticated (which is not to imply that it's bad) cinematography by John Toll, or simply the uncommon humanness of the characters. It's a screenplay-driven film, beyond a shadow of a doubt, but Crowe-the-director knows when to have his collaborators stop babying Crowe-the-writer. And the movie that emerges as a result is, despite its lumps, awfully lovable: beyond question my favorite of the filmmaker's career, albeit one that I like less now (almost inevitably) than when I first saw it at the dangerously impressionable age of 19. If Almost Famous teaches us anything, though, it's that we're all capable of surviving what we do as idiot teens, and then to look backwards at our shapeless young selves with affection and forgiveness. And in a movie full of nice thoughts, I wonder if that might be the nicest.

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GO EAST, OLD MAN

The Homesman is a film with an unimaginably specific and small ideal audience. It is, to begin with, a Western; a Western lover's Western, drunk on the iconography of the genre and steeped in an awareness of the kind of myths told in Western cinema and more than that, the particular language and tenor of those myths. It expects its viewer to know Westerns very well. Not a winning strategy in the 2010s. Meanwhile, it is also a film that holds the morality and conventions of the very same genre in open contempt: it regards the mythologising and wiry masculinity of the traditional Western with extreme distrust. That leaves basically nobody left to be fan of the thing, which is maybe why this terribly excellent film hit the ground stumbling at Cannes and has been greeted with muted positive reviews ever since. That, and the fact that it is unrelentingly bold in its experiments, and some of them don't land, and some of them only land if you're willing to buy into the film's ultimate thematic conclusion that basically sums up as: "fuck it, everything is hopeless". Which cuts into its target audience even more.

The second theatrical feature directed by Tommy Lee Jones (adapting the screenplay from Glendon Swarthout's novel alongside Kieran Fitzgerald & Wesley A. Oliver), and cementing him as an enormously interesting complicator of Western imagery, after his marvelous and horribly underrated The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The Homesman is a film about madness. A specifically female variant of madness: once upon a time in the West, three women were broken down by the sheer oppressive agony of life in the Nebraska Territory, and the male-dominated culture that has managed to take root there. Arabella Sours (Grace Gummer) lost her children to diphtheria, Gro Svendson (Sonja Richter) was badly raped, and Theoline Belknap (Miranda Otto) just up and snapped from the sheer desolation of it all, and killed her child. All three of them have been left incapable of functioning in the merciless, survivalist world of the untamed West, and the community where they live has collectively decided to send them back East to Iowa, where a religious charity will tend to them. Only none of the men in the community can be bothered, and it falls to spinster Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) to escort them all back to civilisation. Crossing paths with a pathetic claim jumper, George Briggs (Jones), Cuddy saves him from a lynching if and only if he'll act as guide and bodyguard.

That takes us around halfway through, which is before things get really peculiar, including a two-thirds twist that completely redirects the film's focus and energies, and is another reason why it's easy to hate the film; if you've been reading it as feminist up till that point (and there's no clear reason why you shouldn't), the twist comes as even more disruptive as a shock, since the film that happens afterwards can't be meaningfully defended as feminist on any level I'm familiar with. Except insofar as it goes to extreme lengths to look with dismay on the performance of masculinity in the context of the American West. Briggs, when we meet him, is a loathsome sad-sack, wheedling and messy and begging; over the course of his exposure to Cuddy, he tries very hard to become a better and more noble soul, and this ends up going nowhere at all. In its last scenes, the film adopts the perspective of late John Ford, the notion that the kind of unapologetic maledom that makes space for European civilisation to enter untamed wild spaces is itself totally unsuited for civilised people, and had better be regarded with cautious, pitying disgust than admiration. There is certainly nothing admirable about Briggs, except for little patches in the back half, and Jones's enthusiastic portrayal of all the character's faults is impressively free of any pride whatsoever.

But where Briggs is the prism through which the film refracts its ideas about morality and behavior in the West and thus, implicitly, in America itself (for what does the West function as in Westerns, if not a symbolic version of the country that rolled in after it?), The Homesman is not his movie. It's maybe not even Cuddy's movie, though you'd be forgiven for thinking that given the excellent precision of the writing and Swank's performance, which combine to make her one of the most singularly well-etched figures in English-language cinema in 2014. The film is really about those three madwomen, barely given lines of dialogue or individualising characteristics outside of the flashbacks that clarify what, exactly, drove them mad. Through all five of its central characters, the film is a pessimistic study of personally identity: how easily it can be broken, in the case of the three ill women; how conditional it is and subject to torment by the offhand cruelty of others, in the case of Cuddy; how powerless we can be to change it despite our best intentions, in the case of Briggs.

In short, it is a study of human, and especially feminine strength in the face of the bleakest hell of life imaginable. The West, as depicted in The Homesman, is a nasty and cruel place: Rodrigo Prieto's gorgeously severe cinematography, framing the horizon as prison that keeps the images pinned down, makes the New Mexican landscapes of the film shoot look beautiful and merciless; Marco Beltrami's score taps into traditional Western-style musical cues while bleaching them of all sentiment. It's a dry, bony film, always grappling in new and ever more eccentric ways with the limits and possibilities of human fortitude in the face of both physical and social cruelty.

Absolutely none of which successfully implies how captivating the whole of it is: impeccably acted, sharply written, and directed with a keen sense of both the power of visuals and the nuances of human behavior. It's not always free from being derivative - Ford's The Searchers and 7 Women are never far from mind, and its desire to probe its characters ends up leading it to some, odd, lumpy places (the last 15 minutes, in particular, are just damned confusing in the way they're assembled). But while it is a flawed film, they are glorious flaws; the flaws that come of trying to be as complicated and challenging as possible, to bend genre rules to one's own will, and to make an experience that genuinely interrogates itself and its audience. It's not always a totally satisfying experience, but it's one of the most engaging and rewarding films of the year even so.

9/10

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DUMB IS AS DUMB DOES

There is one thing that I can say in praise of Dumb and Dumber To, so I might as well lead off with it. It has a certain casual, easy comfort to its style. That is to say, it's a film that picks up the baton of mid-to-late-'90s comedy filmmaking quite effortless and without strain: this is true of the acting as well. Yes, the script is forced to acknowledge that 20 years have gone by since the original Dumb and Dumber, and those years have worn hard enough on co-stars Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels that it's kind of uncomfortable to look at them goofing around like big kids. But in general, it has the texture, pacing, and energy of a film that might have come out around 1996 or '97. Y'know, right around the time that a Dumb and Dumber sequel would have felt appropriate and natural, and not like a desperate bid for relevance by a whole bunch of people whose careers have been out of gas for years and years - I mean, hell, when was the last film made by brothers Bobby & Peter Farrelly that actually made any kind of real impact?

So yes, as a piece of '90s nostalgia, Dumb and Dumber To - which is the best possible title for it, if I'm going to keep hunting for nice things to say - at least understands and appreciates the '90s, and recycles them effectively. Which is something, I guess, but it would be much, much more if the film's archaeological precision was in service to something with more meat on its bones than this pathetic re-tread, which somehow took six credited writers to cobble together, despite fully half of the content being re-dressed or outright re-used jokes from the original film. The plot, once again, is a travelogue: best friends and dysfunctional idiots Lloyd Christmas (Carrey) and Harry Dunne (Daniels) are back in action after 20 years, during which time Lloyd has been faking a catatonic state as a prank against his buddy. Harry's kidneys are about to fail him, and he's discovered that a fling 22 years ago with the legendarily promiscuous Fraida Felcher (played in the present by Kathleen Turner, whose admirable openness about taking this role for pragmatic reasons does not make it any more pleasant to watch such an iconic star make her big comeback as the butt of such mean-spirited jokes as the film blandly lobs her way) led to a daughter. Hoping that she'll donate an organ, the man-boys truck out to find where she ended up after Fraida put her up for adoption, only to end up on the wrong side of a conniving stepmother (Laurie Holden) and handyman (Rob Riggle), hoping to kill the girl's adoptive father (Steve Tom) for his millions and his world-changing new invention. It then takes another road trip out to El Paso, to crash a weak-kneed parody of a TED conference where the daughter, Penny (Rachel Melvin) is accepting an award on her father's behalf. And along the way, Harry and Lloyd are virtually always dumb, when they are not dumber.

It's impressive, after so many years since his heyday, to find that Carrey (51 at the time of shooting) still has the ability to wheel his head around like a whirligig, and flex seemingly every single one of his facial muscles in a different direction all at once (though I must confess to never having found that shtick funny when it was new, and I'm surely no more inclined to it now). And he and Daniels fall instantly into the most relaxed, natural rhythm of feeding off of each other, reacting and leading, stretching moments until they're about to break, and playing the duo's bits and routines with the timing of ballroom dancing and table tennis combined. But mechanically impressive comic acting is all for naught if there's no comedy to back it up, and Dumb and Dumber To is a skeletal wasteland of uninspired, witless non-humor. The Farrelly's humor hasn't felt boldly trashy or dangerous in many, many years, and the calculated packaging of outrageous behavior is the exact antithesis of the sneering, anarchic obnoxious that made them the most successfully edgy mainstream comic filmmakers of the '90s. Dumb and Dumber To is everything and anything but outrageous. It tries, but the same old gross-out sex jokes and low-key bodily fluid humor feels ossified and underwhelming now. Even as someone who never found Dumb and Dumber worth much of anything, I can recognise that film's brazenness; its sequel is a calculated marketing effort, and that shows through every belabored gag set-up and lazy one-note joke bloated out beyond its appropriate limitations.

I don't know that it's surprising that this is where '90s nostalgia leads us: the flailing, overly self-aware pop culture of that period was hardly interesting the first time, with its desire to make everything extreme and loud clashing with the era's unusual facility with recycling. Trying to revisit Dumb and Dumber is self-defeating: one generation's brash newcomer is the next generation's quaint old-fashioned piffle. And this is precisely the pit into which Dumb and Dumber To falls: it combines boringly obvious jokes and plot developments with a misguided hope that bratty attitude and yelling will somehow give it all a sharp comic edge, and this bond doesn't hold even a little bit. It's easy to imagine far worse belated sequels than this, but in terms of being pointless and pathetic and obvious in its elevation of mercenary over artistic concerns, it's hard to name a recent sequel that has been more thoroughly unwanted, unneeded, and disposable.

3/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1995: In which we drink our pee

I foreground pee-drinking not because it's fun to take cheap shots (which it is), but because the film genuinely cares that much. Pee-drinking is the first thing that happens. We get the scene-setting as a portentous but oddly tinny-sounding narrator invokes "The future. The polar ice caps have melted, covering the Earth with water. Those who survived have adapted to a new world." And then this spectacularly expensive motion picture elects to introduce us to that new world by showing the main character running his freshly-pissed pee through a filter, and drinking it.

And thus does the Hollywood Century Trilogy of Spectacular Flops come to a close with the inevitable Waterworld the little $175 million film that couldn't. Though, whereas the legendary misfires Heaven's Gate and Ishtar both lost legitimately enormous sums of money, Waterworld actually came tolerably close to breaking even in 1995, which for a film of such a ridiculous price tag that is never seen onscreen, ain't half bad. What it certainly did not do was stain producer-star Kevin Costner with the stink of epic failure; two years later, Warner Bros. had the rather inexplicable lack of foresight to let him do the whole thing again, with the very similar The Postman (which came not even slightly close to breaking even). And in this it is much unlike the films that ended the careers of Michael Cimino and Elaine May.

I will confess to feeling extremely disappointed: I walked into Waterworld expecting something outrageously terrible, and I got something that's... hell, it's borderline halfway decent. For the first 25 minutes or so, it's even actually good, in its derivative way. The film baldly wants to be The Road Warrior on the open sea, copying the ur-film in the "post-apocalyptic badass vs. colorful weirdoes" genre in many specific beats, above and beyond the normal ripping-off that film had been subjected to in the 14 years since its creation. That being said, the open sea makes for an unusually novel setting for such an overworked scenario, which gives the film a surprisingly fun amount of personality that's entirely its own. The setting falls apart on even the slight push of logic: the world would not, in fact, be covered in water even if the polar caps and all the water bound up in glaciers atop mountains were to melt, nowhere close to it. As far as metaphors begging the audience to stop murdering the ozone layer go, it's not as scientifically inane as The Day After Tomorrow, but it's trending in that direction.

But if we can buy the film's backstory on its own terms, Waterworld makes surprisingly effective use of it for quite a good long while. Outside of that opening narration, the Pete Rader/David Twohy script mostly introduces the rules of the waterworld through showing, not telling, giving it an authentic, natural feeling without too much explaining getting in the way of what turns out to be surprisingly durable internal logic. We're first introduced to a nameless "mariner", apparently the figures in this world who explore the far reaches of known ocean scavenging for barter items, played by Costner in a performance that is by no means "good", in most senses of that word. And this is no real shock, given that Costner is by no means a reliably good actor. But his limitations are well-suited to the character: he plays a peremptory, self-centered man of cold efficiency and limited charms, and given what an enormous asshole he apparently was on the Waterworld shoot, this certainly fits him better than yet another attempt at playing a smooth charmer, something he had last successfully done seven years prior, in Bull Durham.

This mariner hears of a nearby "atoll", a collection of floating debris of the industrial world that was fashioned into a large platform functioning as a town. Here, he tries to find the best price for his most precious possession - a large pot of dirt - and is found out as a mutant, having developed gills behind his ears and webbing beneath his toes. The elders of the atoll consider him enough of a bad omen that they prepare to execute him by drowning him in their pit of compost sludge, but another group of strangers interrupt. Seems that among the many lost souls living on the atoll, there's a little girl named Enola (Tina Majorino), with a tattoo on her back that seemingly points the way to "Dryland", the mystical land which remains uncorrupted by the rising waters. Her guardian, Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn), and a dotty old inventor, Gregor (Michael Jeter) have been concocting a scheme to leave the atoll on a flying machine once they've decoded the tattoo, but despite all Helen's precautions, Enola's secret has been found out by a local piece of obvious bad news named Nord (Gerard Murphy), who is a spy of the local gang of colorful punks. And their leader, a madman naming himself the Deacon (Dennis Hopper), has been on the hunt for any leads on Dryland himself. And the Deacon and his gang of "smokers" - those who travel the open water on what's left of the powerboats and jet skis using what's left of the gasoline - strike the atoll at exactly the convenient moment to distract the mariner's executioners. Helen frees him during the chaos on one condition: he needs to take her and Enola to safety, and thence to whatever promised land Enola's back leads to.

It's right about this point that Waterworld asserts itself as a movie that's not very good: firstly, because Deacon is a destablising villain, too out-of-place in the film's otherwise consistent, thoughtful world, and played with a fiery flare by Hopper that's wildly out of proportion to virtually everybody else in the sullen, angsty cast. Secondly, because for all its charms as a post-apocalyptic travelogue (and I maintain that it has several, all the way to its final scenes), Waterworld turns out to be absolutely horrible as an action film. I do not blame director Kevin Reynolds nor his second unit for this: filming on water is a bitch, and staging elaborate action choreography that involves boats and jet skis is a fool's errand to begin with. But simply because it's excusable doesn't make these scenes any more exciting to watch, nor any more competently shot.

It's also certainly the case that Waterworld is longer than it has any reasonable justification for being. Not that a film of its scope can't earn a running time in excess of two hours, but the film doesn't fill that time with much of anything. After the escape from the atoll (which happens rather early on, all things considered), the writers have only a few basic situations that they cycle between, either the mariner and Helen sniping at each other, or the Deacon setting some manner of trap. Once, there's an impressively-designed but biologically unlikely sea monster. And all this, coupled with the necessary emptiness of the setting, leads to a movie that's circular and slow and draggy right when it needs to be tight and tense.

Still, as an exercise in sloppy, excessive action-adventure cinema - something the 1990s excelled at, just in 1995 alone we have the likes of Judge Dredd and Jumanji and Congo - Waterworld acquits itself far better than its reputation suggests. Outside of a few lines of dialogue the screenwriters missed ("you're a turd that won't flush", snarks the Deacon at one point, in a world where flush toilets have presumably not existed for at least a century or two), the film's world is well-built and provides a suitable setting for its generic story. The sets range from convincing to embarrassingly cheap (this is, again, not a film that looks in any way like it cost half of $175 million), but the imagination and conceptual integrity of the sets (designed by Dennis Gassner), rickety skeletons of torn and ancient metal, and the hacked-together scraps making up the costumes (designed by John Bloomfield), are genuinely impressive, and the story the tell is at least as convincing as the one the characters act out. Dean Semler's cinematographer capturing these things is crisp and bright, nimbly capturing the harshness of light on the open water. It is not a good film - it is often dull, and always trite - but in a period when tentpoles were starting to get drunk on scale and noisy impact, it's far from the most stupid, the most ineptly written, or most generic - just in 1995 alone we have Judge Dredd and Jumanji and Congo. But it's certainly not bad enough to be a cultural punchline, and I admire it for its thoughtful attempt to punch some new life into the post-apocalypse world of deserts and ruined cities, even if its execution leaves a good amount of room for improvement.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1995
-For the actual shape of the future, look to Pixar's Toy Story, the first all-CGI animated feature
-The highest-grossing NC-17 release of all time, Paul Verhoeven's infamous Showgirls, is released
-Richard Linklater directs the quiet story of two kids who fall in love on a train, Before Sunrise, accidentally inaugurating one of cinema's all-time greatest franchises

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1995
-To celebrate the centennial of the Lumière brothers' first exhibition, 40 directors from around the globe contribute a micro-short to the anthology Lumière et compagnie
-Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg announce the rules of Denmark's new hyper-realist Dogme 95 movement
-Britain's favorite movie spy, James Bond, comes out of a six-year retirement in GoldenEye

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: NUN THE WISER

Everything about Ida sounds like it was copied verbatim from the Big Book of European Art Film Clichés: full-frame black and white cinematography with emphasis on the whole range of greys, frequently silent people staring mirthlessly and hopelessly at nothing, the Holocaust looms imposingly in the background, and the whole thing is a metaphor for the silence, absence, or death of God. Small wonder that people have fallen over themselves comparing it to the work of Ingmar Bergman, though it's not always the most apt comparison (there's as much Bresson as Bergman, and arguably more Tarkovsky than either of them, and that's just considering the Big 3 "religious torment" art directors of the '60s and '70s).

And if there's nothing about the film that's necessarily fresh, it's indisputably the case that the things the film is up to haven't been done with so much care and artistry and sophistication are things that haven't been done like this in a lot of years. The fifth narrative feature directed by Paweł Pawlikowski, and also the first made in his native Poland, finds him working at a sublimely confident level that blows away even the quiet potency of his outstanding 2004 My Summer of Love, the closest thing he's had to a prominent film prior to now. Ida, to begin with, solves the thorniest of problems, ones that most films of this sort give up on before they even try to start solving it: how can we use this visual medium of ours to dramatise internal struggles? Even without getting into the question of what it's depicting, I'm steadily impressed by how the film depicts things, using heavily off-kilter framings and precise gradations of hue to guide our eyes and explain the emotional relationships between characters, or between characters and the space surrounding them. It's so clear and high-impact that in its 82 minutes, it has more clearly laid out a more complex psychological journey than films twice as long.

A simple story for a powerful but ultimately direct aesthetic: Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) is a novice in a Polish convent, sometime in the early 1960s. She is instructed by her Mother Superior (Halina Skoczyńska) that, before she may take her vows, she must meet with her long-lost aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza), a bitter judge, formerly a model Communist before alcohol and self-loathing took over. With disinterest so objective it can't even be considered cruel, Wanda reveals a truth that burns the girl's sense of self to the ground: Anna was born Ida Lebenstein, the child of Jews who were killed by the Nazis, but were first able to hide their daughter with a kindly Catholic family to save her. Thus begins a sobering, dismal road trip, as Anna/Ida and Wanda travel through Poland to find the last resting place of the Lebensteins, so that both women might be able to say their goodbyes. Do you suppose that painful truths about post-War Poland and the two traveling companions are revealed in this process? And how they are!

The biggest single problem I have with Ida is that it would surely have been more important and powerful if it had been made at the time it was set, or at least by the end of the '70s. As it is, with a half-century between the society it depicts and itself, it feels distinctly safe, one of those We Know Now What We Should Have Then period pieces that's just a smidgen too proud of its own hindsight.

Not much of a complaint, though, against a film as beautiful and rich in human feeling as it is ice cold in its depiction of human weakness. Ida takes place in a cold universe, visually and morally: the grey imagery of Ryszard Lenczewski and Łukasz Żal's cinematography presents a wintery feeling of desolation, while the script that Pawlikowski co-wrote with Rebecca Lenkiewicz tells the familiar story of a post-Holocaust society that wants to deal with the horror in its recent past by blocking out every trace of the past. In Anna's own journey and the doubt it stirs up in her, the film raises grim questions about the possibility of marrying material happiness with spiritual fulfillment; taking this cue, the film literalises this conflict by loading itself full of shots with extraordinary amounts of headspace. These images constantly emphasise the space above Anna, signifying maybe the presence of God, or more caustically (for these are very empty headspaces, most of the time), the vacuum left by the absence of God. Or perhaps it's just a way for the film to suggest the emotional desolation of life rebuilding itself after the War. It works either way, really.

To keep things from getting too airy and conceptual and divorced from human feeling, Ida is lucky to have a pair of absolutely superb performances at its center. Trzebuchowska, playing a young woman's confusion at finding her identity ripped away from her, manages to embody a rather difficult psychological concept perfectly; as a woman who has lived apart from the messy, fleshy part of life, only to find herself now confronted with the world outside the convent in all its enticing scariness, she does exemplary work with rather more conventional but also more humane material. As good as she is, though, Kulesza dominates the frame, both because Wanda is the stronger personality of the two, and because she captures the fatigue and constant low-grade anger and cynicism of her character in blunt, and physically outsized ways that are expressive and theatrical without seeming forced or unnatural (that the film is, itself, in no particular way naturalistic helps this performance to land). It is, absolutely, one of the most commanding, empathetic performances I've seen all year. Between them, the two stars force Ida to remain a film about its characters, not its ideas. But those ideas are still deep and sobering, just as those characters are complex and unpredictable in the best ways, and the film containing them is one of the clear highlights of the movie year.

9/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '14: THE PRESIDENT (MOHSEN MAKHMALBAF, GEORGIA / FRANCE / UK / GERMANY)

Winner of the Gold Hugo for Best Film
Screens at CIFF: 10/15 & 10/16
World premiere: 30 August, 2014, Venice International Film Festival

Satire doesn't get much more on-the-nose, snottily sarcastic, or, in fairness, absolutely hilarious as the opening of The President, a most uncharacteristic but hugely welcome surprise from self-exiled Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. A narrator waxes rhapsodic about the beauty of the capital city in this nameless (but pretty obviously former Soviet) nation, with special attention paid to the beloved president-for-life, also nameless, whose vision is what caused the city to bathed in attractive modern light. And then we travel up to the presidential palace, where the president himself (Misha Gomiashvili) is sitting with his beloved grandson (Dachi Orvelashvili), indulging the boy's every random question with happy patience, and for a finale, offers to let the boy place a call to have the entire power grid shut down and turned back on over and over again the way that a child of less powerful descent might play with the lights on a Christmas tree. That is: the dictator literally treats the city under his command like a child's toy. No wonder that during one of the dark patches, the city suddenly erupts in revolution.

No, not subtle at all. Funny, though - between Gomiashvili's warm grandpa routine crashing aggressively into the thoughtless brutality of his actions, and the grandson's ridiculously adorable little mini-dictator costume, there's a warped, zingy sense of black comedy here, one that mocks the president with unabashed glee. That's not a tone the film keeps up (it would undoubtedly be too smug and juvenile to bear if that were the case), although it does frequently drift back into angry comedy, ready at any moment to remind us of how ridiculous and awful this character is any time he starts to seem too pathetic.

Which is a real possibility, for The President adopts the shape of a travelogue, in which an old man and his grandson journey through the rural part of their country, learning truths. As the president, deposed in the wake of that revolution (a protracted sequence suggesting that, beyond his customary skill with character and his newfound facility for humor, Makhmalbaf might have a really good action thriller hiding in him, too), wanders through the immense poverty and suffering his policies have caused, he discovers for the first time that actual human beings have been affected by his capricious behavior, and that the love he though all his people had for his regime was actually fear and resentment hiding behind desperately waving his poster around in attempt to avoid becoming the next political prisoner. What this knowledge does not do, as I feared for a while it might, is turn the president soft, like an eastern European Scrooge; it also doesn't quite push him into the territory of Lear wandering the heath in a mad daze, though Lear is undoubtedly in the back of Makhmalbaf and co-writer (and wife) Marziyeh Meshkiny's minds throughout the long middle section of the film, where he prostrates himself more and more, discarding his miltary garb for peasant's clothes and then for a prisoner's cloak.

There is a kind of awareness going on, tempered by humiliation and rage; what is going on, in fact, is that the president is discovering actual humanity for the first time, both in the targets of his dictatorial cruelty and in himself. This couldn't possibly work without such a measured, complicated performance as the one Gomiashvili gives; he reveals weakness and blossoming self-knowledge without requiring that we overlook the fact that the man going through this is a murderer and thug. It's remarkably delicate, how the actor and by extension the film ask us to understand the president without having any notion of our forgiving or liking him.

Essentially the film posits that people are people, even horrible dictators, and as it moves towards its increasingly grim concluding acts, it begins to showcase how tempting the overuse of violent power is to anyone, demonstrating how the revolutionaries are as capable of making life hell for the people of the country as the president himself ever was. It is, at absolutely no credit to its originality, about how power corrupts, a theme of considerable antiquity, though by virtue of always being ignored by everybody, it remains important to keep retelling stories like this. The dictator loves his grandson; he doesn't regard himself as a bad person; he is capable of suffering from cold and hunger and fear. He is a person. The film doesn't spell this out to let him off the hook, but to keep us on our toes, admitting that the potential for evil and violence isn't something that only the monsters are born with.

It's a rich and wonderful character study, light on its feet and sophisticated about re-packaging its insights into how easy it is for humans to go wrong, hard and savage in depicting what that wrongness looks like. Whether considering the effects of the president's own depravities, or of the new depravities being visited upon the world by his enemies, the film confronts everything with a steady, unblinking eye; when recognising that the revolutionaries or the president are people, it reverses into beautiful poetry, most satisfyingly in a lengthy circular tracking shot that reduces the president and his most miserable victims to the status of humans all needing more connection to the rest of humanity. It is a film fascinated by people, much too fascinated to hate even the worst of them; it's that, not the satire nor the violence nor the sometimes clumsy use of the child as an purified innocent, that makes this a captivating piece of storytelling and intimate work of cinema.

8/10

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ROAD TO NOWHERE

The good news: Tammy isn't entirely about making fun of fat people for being fat fatties who eat the fuck out of food when they're not falling down on their fat asses for being so fat that they can't even stand on their fat legs. And as such, whenever future cinephiles are attending Melissa McCarthy retrospectives, it will be a gratifying step up from the hellish Identity Thief, a film whose hatred of McCarthy was so unrelenting that I was genuinely sad that she'd felt compelled to take the part. On the other hand, McCarthy is the producer and co-writer, with her husband Ben Falcone, of Tammy, and Falcone directed it, and if this is what passes for a passion project, I think that the time has come to stop feeling sorry for a demonstrably talented comic actor getting shitty parts, and instead begin bemoaning the same talented actor's repugnant tastes.

Tammy is a bizarre, dysfunctional grab-bag that wants to cram far too many tonal shifts into one foul-mouthed road comedy, and has nothing even resembling the skillful writing nor the tightly controlled filmmaking to even begin to make such a mulligan stew palatable. It focuses on a certain Tammy, of course, played by McCarthy as only a slightly modified version of the bossy screamer she's made into her one and only cinematic trick (her TV work showcases such a different, broader scope of skills that it's barely possible to square the two incarnations of one performer). It's not Tammy's mouth or her attitude that has in trouble at the start of the movie, but sheer dumb luck: she hit a deer on the way into work, which made her late, which was the last straw for her nasty little petulant boss (Falcone, gamely besting his wife in the "how awful can I make myself look?" competition). So she's fired, and when she arrives back home, it's to find her husband (Nat Faxon) and next door neighbor (Toni Collette) having a romantic dinner, and now that her life has completely imploded, she walks two doors down to where her mother (Allison Janney) lives with her grandmother Pearl (Susan Sarandon). You will note that I have only bothered giving just the one character name; this is because Pearl and Tammy are, for a long time, the only characters who matter whatsoever, and so we are treated to the immensely saddening spectacle of seeing actors like Janney, Sandra Oh, Kathy Bates, and Dan Aykroyd appear for at best a scene or two which asks them to do things they have done literally dozens of times now (Bates), gives them absolutely nothing to do but recite lines in a uniform tone of voice (everybody but Bates), or stand there gawking without even any lines, just sort of occupying the frame and making me wonder with something approaching actual, literal horror what kind of terrible culture would reduce somebody with that much goddamn talent to the role of a glorified prop (Collette). There is the test, I forget the exact wording, but it's something like, "could this character be replaced with a coat rack that had a sign hanging on it, without it changing the plot?" Collette's character could be replaced by a naked coat rack.

Anyway, Tammy can drive, Pearl has money and a car, and so they take off from the dead-end of Murphysboro, IL, on a trip to Niagara Falls; one drunken night later, they're stuck in Louisville, Kentucky, where Pearl meets the horny middle-aged man Earl (Gary Cole), and Tammy flirts badly with Earl's son Bobby (Mark Duplass), who will eventually come around to finding her fascinating, in a fairly desperate gambit to make this film look even marginally less anxious to make fun of overweight people. A fast food restaurant is robbed, a lesbian picnic is visited, and everything is much too shapeless and devoid of energy to be funny in any way. The impression I have is of a movie where simply gathering everything together into the broad shape of a feature-length film exhuasted everybody too much to bother doing anything else with it. The film is crammed full of scenes that have the approximate structure of jokes, but not the timing nor the apparent payoff (a keen example: the reveal that Tammy lives two doors down from her parents, which is staged in a lateral tracking shot that implies it's supposed to be hilarious in some way, and it's just not). Even more often still, the movie doesn't even bother to act like it's telling jokes, as in the interminable lesbian 4th of July celebration, a monstrously long stopover that fills several empty plot-driven needs, as though McCarthy and Falcone realised upon reaching that point in the script that if they didn't start resolving dangling emotional threads, the film would hit two hours without a climax.

At the same time it's failing to be a funny comedy, Tammy is failing, to somewhat less ugly results, to be a character drama; there's a lot of stuff about living life to the fullest, and not blaming other people for your problems, and it's all awfully clichéd and virtually none of it feels very legitimate (the point where, in the form of some old-fashioned Kathy Bates truth-tellin', the film shifts from a celebration of Tammy and Pearl's freedom seeking to an indictment of their dumb, shallow selfishness happens so clumsily that you can almost hear the mechanics of the screenplay clunking). Falcone is nowhere remotely near a supple enough director to make the necessary maneuvers of tone to adjust from the scenes where Tammy is a klutzy, yelling idiot to the scenes where she's a sensitive soul who just needs some understanding and self-love, and McCarthy's performance is entirely devoted to finding a chilled-out mode where she just hangs back and snarks, and this mode ends up serving nothing in the movie. Whatever human depth it reaches comes exclusively from Sarandon, whose stockpile of highly self-aware sexuality from the days of her youth are played off in fun and lively ways, though the fact that Sarandon can excel in the "slutty grandma" role against an actor only 24 years her junior is no kind of real achievement, and only the fact that I'm pleased to see her with any role of decent size in a high-profile relief keeps that fact from depressing me as much as it ought to.

In short, Tammy is lazy, ineffectual filmmaking with hypocritical aims towards being a sympathetic character study of a woman it repeatedly mocks for being a hefty eater and sloppy mess; it is neither smart nor funny, when it desperately wants to be both. McCarthy is a talented performer, and I assume at some point she'll get a part that isn't "gross and angry and loud", if only by accident. It is, at any rate, no real surprise that she didn't get it this time.

4/10

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: ON THE ROAD WITH SUSAN SARANDON

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: Tammy is about being desperate, broke, screwed over by a man, and looking to solve it all by taking to the road with Susan Sarandon as your wingman. Or perhaps it's about being comically fat and comically vulgar. But let us pretend it's the former.

Almost a quarter of a century on, I'm pretty close to certain that the final scene is the most famous thing about Thelma & Louise, so I'm not going to hesitate in talking about it. Bail out if you need to - if there's any way to see the film without knowing where it ends up (I missed my chance by a solid 10 years), you should do it, because it's one of the great American films of the '90s, and the best thing that Ridley Scott ever directed that didn't take place in an impressively designed industrial future.

The reason I lead with the ending, of all things, is because it's the ending, however iconic and perfect, that tends to problematise what the film actually turns out to be, relative to what it's acting like it has been the whole time. Basically, we have a film that looks like empowerment, in which a pair of women who've gotten all fed up with the bullshit of men stop putting up with it, and reclaim their lives. And, having spent an entire film doing that, they die. Now, obviously, there's the defense that they have taken ownership of the most important thing of all - their life and death, which is now not being conceded to the male law enforcement officers surrounding them at the edge of a canyon. But it's a hard thing to describe as "feminist" a movie that only allows its female leads to experience self-empowerment if they pay with their lives at the end of it.

None of which, I want to make absolutely clear, is to say that Thelma & Louise is terribly bad. It's not even to say that it's not still, mostly, a bold and angry statement of feminism; and we could also argue that the film is striking a blow for equality precisely in that it's willing to present its pair of heroines the way that so many male characters have been in so many movies: as likable, relatable characters that we all root for, even as they're doing terrible things and making exaggeratedly bad life choices. It is, after all, an "outlaws on the run" thriller, and those are easy to adore for the complexity of the characters, not for how admirable they are. All that screenwriter Callie Khouri (whose post T&L career - that is to say, the lack thereof - is bizarre and frustrating) did was to apply that framework to a pair of women going through specific experiences that a man wouldn't, and let the characters be who they had to be, even when that means that they're wrong. So maybe it really is feminist. I don't know. As I have a penis, I long ago determined it was best if I prohibit myself from having definitive opinions on these matters.

Anyway, artistic representation and politics are fun to discuss and all, but it's no good to get so stuck in the mud as to lose sight of the fact that Thelma & Louise is an absolutely terrific movie, buoyed up by a pair of tremendous performances from Geena Davis (as Thelma) and Susan Sarandon (as Louise), both of them doing what might easily be declared to be the best work of their careers. Scott's directing is jaw-droppingly good considering how far the material is from what any glance at his films before or since would indicate to be his comfort zone; it has the first truly great score composed by Hans Zimmer; and it's the last film Adrian Biddle shot before his career plummeted into making generic boilerplate crap like 101 Dalmatians, 102 Dalmatians, and the deathless City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly's Gold look at least halfway decent, and the best thing the cinematographer ever did. Any fool who can at least use the focus ring correctly can make the Southwest of the United States look like the most gorgeous landscape created by God in a particularly dramatic mood; but there is true greatness in making the California and Utah landscapes where Thelma & Louise was shot (though no scene in the travelogue takes place in either of those states) look the way Biddle did. The film relies, to a degree that isn't given sufficient credit, on its use of two color families to define the conflict and drive the narrative, and Biddle succeeds here in reducing the landscape to piercing, pungent expressions of just those colors: the hard orange of the earth, the creamy blue of the sky.

What I had never realised before was that Thelma & Louise is, in fact, an early example of the old "orange and teal" trick that would, 15 years or more after its release, come to ruin visual expression in mainstream cinema; perhaps because it had to be done knowingly and purposefully and above all, in advance, with no relying on digital tinkering in post to boost all the colors to a point that Vincente Minnelli wouldn't have been able to imagine in his nightmares, Thelma & Louise also has a more useful and effective presentation of those colors. Basically, blue and orange don't dominate the film simply because they contrast nicely with each other (though God knows they do), but because of what that contrast connotes. Basically, Biddle and Scott use color-coding to divide the film into "teams", or rather to use the colors to explain what team is "winning". Blue and related colors are, in this film, exceptionally sleek and exceptionally cold, and it is always used to define spaces dominated by men. Orange, yellow, brown, and all sorts of earth tones, are warm, associated with light sources, and come to the fore in moments when Thelma and Louise are free to be themselves. The first we see of Louise, in the opening shot of the main movie after the picturesque landscape photography beneath the credits (given hazy, half-menacing, half-dreamy emphasis by Zimmer's zoned-out main theme; apparently, Scott only included an opening credit sequence after hearing Zimmer's music and deciding it needed a special moment to be foregrounded), is as part of an undifferentiated mass of human activity in a diner where she waits tables under a manager with a deeply unimaginative sense of leering and flirting; and this space is bright and very cool and blue. Thelma is introduced moments later, in a hushed and quiet home she shares with her bullying husband Darryl (Christopher McDonald); it is dim and so harsh in its metallic blues as to feel like a robot's innards. When the women leave on their road trip, it's in Louise's shiny green car, the one object that obviously sits outside of the film's duochromatic scheme, and which is situated in the frame in a way that emphasises its sleekness and potential energy, pointing off at the dusty, bright ground where the adventurers are about to escape the chilling blue that dominates and defines their everyday life. And so it is throughout: every time the women are being in some way trapped by men - rapists, hunky thieves, Louise's boyfriend, cops - blues start to creep in and dominate, as the film loses visual warmth by the frame.

It's absolutely gorgeous filmmaking, and would be even if Khouri's script wasn't so smartly balanced - it's a road trip movie in which every scene feels like it's building on the one before, rather than simply stringing along incidents in a more-or-less dramatic arc, which is impressive even without bringing the sharp characteristations into it - or Scott's direction so focused and tense. At 129 minutes, Thelma & Louise is awfully long for a story that could have been told in a '70s exploitation picture (which, in a lot of ways, it resembles) in two-thirds the running time, and it keeps ditching to scenes of the primary investigator Hal Slocumb (Harvey Keitel) hunting the women while sympathising with them, among other, even more disposable moments; yet it flies by and never feels like there's even a single moment wasted. The amount of visual variety helps with that (the contrast between snug close-ups and extremely wide panoramas filling up the anamorphic widescreen frame is marvelous), and so do the tremendous lead performances; Davis at her best isn't up to pulling attention from Sarandon, but the latter actress is absolutely not selfish, and the interplay between the two actors is fresh and relaxed and joyful, while their individual highlights showcase all sorts of marvelous character detail - Sarandon's exquisite body acting during a phone call with her boyfriend (Michael Madsen), all twisted up and nervous and clenched; Davis's schoolgirlish slavering over the hunky hitchhiker played by fresh new discovery Brad Pitt (whom the camera happily ogles, an impressive feat given all the straight men making the film). And it has some absolutely flawless line deliveries: Davis's blunt, authoritative "How long before we're in goddamn Mexico", with a look of perfect clarity and strength on her face, or Sarandon's "The scene of our last goddamn crime!" spoken with an enthusiasm and humor that come from nowhere and is positively electrifying.

The thing's not perfect: in his 1991 review, Roger Ebert adroitly noticed that the final freeze frame fades to white with "unseemly haste", and it certainly does feel like the movie suddenly jams to a halt, like a roller coaster that flings you against the safety bar when you pull into the unloading station, and it takes a lot of wind out of the whole feature. But it's freakishly close to perfection, full of tremendously smart images cut together by Thom Noble with a lot of tumbling momentum and a hint of irony (the cutting seems to be as eager to get away from Darryl as Thelma is), a whole host of outstanding supporting performances from basically everybody, and Sarandon and Davis lording over everything with two of the best roles mainstream Hollywood gave to any actresses during the whole of the 1990s. It's a smart deconstruction of social norms and an exciting, fun, tight thriller, and neither of those successes ever gets in the way of the other; basically, this is the kind of film that one wishes every mainstream movie would aspire to be, and it succeeds in almost every way at fulfilling those aspirations.

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CHASING CARS

There's something especially annoying about a movie that veers between mostly good and very good for its entire running time, only to complete puke itself apart in the last few minutes. I present to you The Rover, writer-director David Michôd's sophomore feature after his impressive but in many ways frustratingly commonplace crime thriller Animal Kingdom. Two times isn't enough to make a tradition, but that's twice now that Michôd has almost succeeded in making a real genre classic, but just couldn't quite make it happen, and if it happens a third time, someone will have to give him a stern talking-to about the right things to do with one's obvious talent.

In the case of The Rover is that old chestnut, the Post-Apocalyptic Australian Movie About Desert Wanderers and Their Cars. It's not quite right to call the movie a knock-off of, or homage to Max Max and its series, so much as a distillation of themes, tropes, and iconography from across the gamut of post-apocalypse storytelling: the film Mad Max, the book The Road, the video game Fallout. Wisely, the film does not try to be about the fall (which it alludes to elliptically in an opening card, white on black: "Australia, ten years after the collapse"), nor the state of society after the fall; it takes for granted our ability to quickly tease out the general shape and scale of how much things have gone to shit, and uses that as the basis for a kind of character study. And I say "kind of" rather advisedly, for that's really the whole trick of the thing: it's actually more of an anti-character study, dedicating itself not to the explication of how one man's personality functions, but to the explication of how and why one man would cease to have a personality. It's a character study set in a world where character has become a liability, and our protagonist as succeeded in eradicating his.

That protagonist is very clearly and persistently never given a name: we can think of him as the rover of the title, though the end credits call him Eric, in a clear-cut case of bullshit. In any case, he's played fantastically by Guy Pearce, in the sort of performance that doesn't announce itself as "acting" in any conventional sense: Pearce doesn't do much with his line deliveries, since he only speaks in curt bursts of words; and he doesn't do much with his face, which is grimy, bearded, and mostly inflexible. It's his coiled-up body language that impresses: tension that speaks to a history of survival and violence, animalistic in the sense that human beings are animals, and the world the film depicts is one in which we're not much else.

At its best - and it really does spend a lot of time at its best, for something that left me feeling so itchily unsatisfied - The Rover plays like a fable of hopelessness, depicting a world where the state of mind that defines every character is the degree to which they remain optimistic that something like order and reason still exists. The rover is at one extreme end of that: he exists for nothing, seemingly, but the individual moment, having concluded that no future moment is likely to be so different from any other that it's worth bothering about any of them. He is a nihilist in an unusually exquisite and pure form: not your teenage nihilist, who just hates, and not your cynical nihilist, who uses it to secretly assume superiority. He is a nihilist because there's nothing not to be nihilistic about: he lives in a laweless, amoral world, nothing he does again will ever matter, and nobody will ever care. The film's plot occurs when three men - Henry (Scoot McNairy), Caleb (Tawanda Manyimo), and Archie (David Field) - steal his car from the little shithole in the middle of nowhere where he... lives? Is temporarily resting? It doesn't really matter. The point is, the three are in a frenzy, having recently fucked up a robbery that left Henry's brother dead, and have managed to crash their truck. The see a car just sitting there outside a little shack, and they steal it; the owner of that car manages to see it just too late to catch them, though he's able to get their truck started to follow them. Along the way, he finds that Henry's brother Rey (Robert Pattinson) isn't so dead as all that, and he grabs the young man of apparently limited mental capacity, first to help him track the fleeing robbers, then because he latches onto Rey as a companion in need of help and care. But that comes very late.

For the great bulk of its running time, The Rover appears to be a very simple, direct, feverishly focused depiction of a man who exists in such a rundown, stateless place of being that matters of motivation are simply pointless: his car was stolen, it is his car, he will retrieve his car. It's as brutal, bleak and nasty as you could please, while also being one of the most intelligent, unromantic, serious attempts to grapple with what actual post-collapse life might function like that I can call to mind. It suggests, rather cruelly, that we're on track to our own meaningless non-society, and demands that we ponder for at least the film's running time what it might feel like to live that way, to actually have no hope and no hope of hope. Until the end. I won't give away what happens; there's a protracted ending sequence that I didn't much care for, but was willing to concede that endings are hard, and sometimes the thing that seems right is to give the viewer the raucous payoff that the rest of the film has so rigidly avoided, even if it wasn't all that right. But the last, literally, 30 or 60 seconds of the film, are just fucking dumb - we find out that the rover had a motivation all along in a twist that completely shifts everything that has played out for the entire movie, but not to such interesting effect that it was worth having lied about it the whole time. I still like the movie in my head better, but the movie explained by the twist would be just fine, if it had explained itself early enough to inform the experience of watching the movie. But coming as it does, it's just a tedious "fuck you" - not even a fun "fuck you", the kind of "fuck you" that reinforces the film's nihilistic themes. It's a mean "fuck you" that exists only because, what the hell, twists are a thing you can end movies with. So why not end 'em that way.

And the twist having so completely broken the movie's spell, it becomes a lot easier to start carping on all the things that movie had been doing wrong the whole time, the scenes that don't play, the concepts that are bonkers in the wrong way, the flares-ups of melodrama and trite theme-explaining that were tolerable when the thing was a savage beast of driving momentum, and end up feeling like a gifted but undisciplined writing student doing a really swell Cormac McCarthy impersonation without McCarthy's cosmic gravity.

Now, parts of the movie still work no matter what: Pearce is brilliant, and Pattinson is at his career-best, playing a man who looks, at first, like an undistinguished Faulknerian man-child before he slowly reveals himself to be a dreamer, a moral thinker, an innocent who would have fit better in the pre-collapse world he apparently has some unfocused nostalgia for. Given all the ways the performance could have been annoying, it's pretty great that Pattinson turns his character's puppy-like craving for someone to guide him into an interesting, moving performance. The thing is also blessed by some breathtaking cinematography by Natasha Braier, which is by no stretch of the imagination "attractive", but presents the sand-blasted Outback in which the film takes place with amazing potency, stressing the vacantness, the far horizon, and the monochromatic dustiness. It's an amazing vision of the end of the world.

Basically, The Rover is a film I would have slightly adored if it had ended 10 minutes earlier, liked if it had ended one minute earlier and can't quite tolerate the way it is. Does that make it a failure? I don't know that I've quite worked that one out yet. It makes it hellaciously frustrating, that's for goddamn sure, and not the kind of frustrating that still ends up feeling rewarding, somehow.

6/10

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