A FILM THAT WILL LIVE IN INFAMY

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

Recommended musical accompaniment to this review.

Obviously, if we're talk about pure, rancid anti-cinematic imbecility, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is Michael Bay's worst movie and will almost certainly remain that way, for it's difficult to imagine a worse film that doesn't reach out and murder the post-production team before they have a chance to complete it. But if you asked me which one I hated the most, which one I would least want to have to see twice - as I now have, thanks to this damn fundraiser and the cruelty of those who would claim to be my friends - I wouldn't take a moment to answer: Pearl Harbor. Revenge of the Fallen is at least about giant robots from space. Pearl Harbor is a reprehensible mangling of history, which isn't inherently a bad thing - many a good film has looked at the annals of historical fact and decided "meh, fuckit", from the earliest days of narrative cinema - though instead of mangling history in the service of some insightful work of dramatic art and character study, it slathers its ahistorical twaddle onto a tepid, wannabe-Titanic love story, under the stewardship of a man whose career has ranged from the emotional depth of an 11-year-old boy all the way up to a 13-year-old boy.

The film is about two best friends from a version of Tennessee that couldn't be any more shamelessly, heart-tuggingly Rockwellian. Maybe if they threw a jumping, slobbery puppy in there, or something. Even before we meet a single human being, we've already heard Hans Zimmer's deeply earnest score, dripping with melancholic evocations of Classic Americana and warm, easy patriotism; we've already seen John Schwartzman's lusciously Malickian sunset photography in all the shades of nostalgia. And no insult meant to either Zimmer or Schwartzman, whose work throughout the film is of the highest caliber; it is hard to imagine anyone improving upon their work, which is plainly no less than what they had asked of them. The problem is not with the cinematography or the music per se, but with the underlying conception driving not just those elements but the whole ethos of the movie.

Simply put, this is what happens when Michael Bay does patriotism, and like everything else in his career, it's awful. Even more awful than when he tries to do smart sci-fi or satire, because Pearl Harbor requires a particularly delicate touch: it's a period film, which is already a minefield that requires either a keen awareness of how people moved and talked 60 years before the film's release, or a particular stylistic intention that justifies modern attitudes and deliberate anachronism, and neither of those apply here. It hardly requires mentioning that the guiding hand of the bombastic crapshow Armageddon wouldn't even be able to daydream about handling World War II with anything but the most stupidly gung-ho adoration for military doodads. And this isn't by any means a scenario that could benefit from Bay's characteristic enthusiasm giant metal cocks with the U.S. flag painted on them: Randall Wallace's screenplay is far more interested on the romantic triangle between good Tennessee boys in the U.S. Army Air Corps (later the Army Air Forces, a change that occurs in the time frame of the movie, though it's not mentioned), Capt. Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) and Capt. Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett), who both fall in love with nurse Lt. Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale), Rafe when he meets her in New York in January 1941, Danny at the U.S. Navy base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, after Rafe has left for Europe to fly with the RAF, and has been incorrectly reported dead. He re-enters their lives on 6 December, 1941, just so that the blow-up between them all can mirror in the most shockingly inappropriate way that whole attack thingy that shows up the next morning late afternoon. And things do not repair themselves for months, until Rafe and Danny both sign on for Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle's (Alec Baldwin) famed attack on the Japanese archipelago in April, 1942, when one of the men must make the ultimate sacrificcccccccccccccccccccc sorry, fell asleep on my keyboard.

The miracle of Pearl Harbor lies in the number of different ways that it's totally unacceptable as a work of cinema and a dramatic story. There's the obvious shortcomings the film as an enormous misrepresentation of living history (an apparent specialty of Wallace's - he also wrote Braveheart), ranging from the innocuous (Bay had the colors of the Mitsubishi Zeroes flown by the Japanese changed so they'd look cooler) to the reprehensible (the re-ordering of chronology to change what the military brass knew and when) to the fucking nuts. Fucking nuts isn't enough. This is a film in which President Roosevelt (Jon Voight), in order to make a point about America's determination, stands up out of his goddamn wheelchair.

It's also simply a wreck of storytelling, with its grotesque structural lurches from the love story to a historical wide view, without any rhyme or reason to how it attempts to combine those elements. Hell, the fact that FDR is in the movie at all is as deeply questionable of a choice as then having him turn into some kind of polio-defying superman: Pearl Harbor is a story about a lot of things, and it's muddled about all of them, but the machinations of Washington politics are absolutely not on the list of things that fit comfortably into the rest. It's frankly only just barely a film in which the attack on Pearl Harbor fits: the story climaxes with Rafe and Danny flying in the Doolittle Raid, while in the scheme of things, the attack is more of an inconvenience that redirects the characters' attention without actually changing the stakes at all. And the poor writing isn't limited to form: the film's dialogue is justly infamous for its mixture of tortured verbiage in a weak attempt to ape '40s speech, and its ludicrous, artless bluntness: "I think World War II just started", delivered with forced determination by Hartnett, is right up there with "Come on, Hitler, I'll buy you a glass of lemonade" from 2002's Max in the annals of lines from historical fiction that make the entire medium of cinema a little bit shabbier.

The characters and acting are atrocious: Affleck, Hartnett, and Beckinsale are an unholy trinity of blandness and low-charisma, and while there are a few flashes in the supporting cast of anything resembling humanity - Baldwin makes a good Doolittle, and Mako has the requisite solemnity as Admiral Yamamoto - the great majority of the supporting cast is distinctive more for being curiously terrible than fading into vanilla obscurity like the leads. The way William Fichtner lurches into the movie like a drunk asshole in the 1923 prologue sets a poor standard that the rest of the movie keeps folllowing: when even as magnetic a presence as Michael Shannon comes off like a flailing moron, you know that things are going deeply wrong.

And of course, Bay conducts all of this with maximum bombast and no worries about how much, if any, sense it all makes. His customary beer commercial aesthetic not being suited for a story of people living and dreaming in 1941, he instead goes for the romantic drama version of the same, which is why we get so many eye-searing sunsets and shots of trees and water - cut by the four-man editing team, amusingly enough, with the same whiz-bang madness of the average car chase or gun battle in a Bay picture. It's even more why we get Evelyn and Danny making love in the most overwrought, aggressive scene of impressionistic gentleness ever put to film, with soft focus and gentle lighting and sheets blowing in the wind that are exactly the Bay version of soap opera sex scenes, trite imagery blown up to 11 and screaming at us. There are flourishes that are the worst thing in the whole world: a newsreel photographer gets shot, so the camera falls to the ground and records him dying and we see it in cocked black-and-white, a scene that recalls Saving Private Ryan as filtered through unapologetic assholery.

It is impossible to catalogue all the ways in which Pearl Harbor is tasteless, overblown, or boring; it's not even good as mindless war action, with the 7 December attack itself a messy collage of disconnected scenes that finds Bay's mayhem skills at a low ebb. If there's a single positive element to this movie, I am certain that I cannot name it; it is overstuffed bullshit that enthusiastically mocks real history and the real sacrifices of human beings who lived long enough to respond to the film with acidic dismissal. There's more incompetent filmmaking out there - but not by a terribly huge margin - but there aren't many films that I find more genuinely vile.

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OLD SOLDIERS NEVER DIE

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

The body of work created by the filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (credited equally as writers, directors, and producers, though it's generally understood that Powell was more the director, while Pressburger was more the writer and producer) is arguably the high water mark of all British cinema, and their 1943 collaboration The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is maybe the most essentially, urgently British of the 21 films they made together. It is probably the most epic and ambitious in scale and intention: it's a World War II propaganda film with a real message on its mind other than the usual "We can do it if we stick together!" cheerleading typical of its generic bedfellows, that bases its analysis of what the people of the British isles could and should do to stave off the Nazi threat in a long-form study of military history spanning nearly half of a century. It does this in the body of one immaculately conservative soldier named Major-General Clive Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesey, flawlessly playing a brash youth and a puffed-up old man so distinctly that it's almost difficult to believe that they were both a 37-year-old actor), inspired in his personality and appearance by Colonel Blimp, the star of a satirical comic strip by David Low, but infinitely more expansive in personality; and it does this in the form of what must absolutely be the most excitingly shot British production I can personally name up to that point in history, the moment that Powell's directorial style snapped into focus and provided a visual means of expression that's neither exactly Hollywood nor exactly European. It would not, for my taste, remain the best production released under the banner of the Archers (Powell & Pressburger's independent company, through which they'd make all of their films until 1957), with their post-war efforts A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes eclipsing it in stylistic and structural complexity, and overall excellence, respectively. But it's more radical than they are, inventing out of thin air what they (and the rest of the Archers' output) would thereupon refine and build from.

The movie begins and ends in 1942, where Wynne-Candy is an old and slightly ridiculous ex-Army figure, spending his retirement advising and training the Home Guard. He's introduced as the butt of something halfway between a prank and a political demonstration: the evening afternoon before a war game is meant to start at midnight, brash young lieutenant "Spud" Wilson (James McKechnie) breaks into the Turkish bath where Wynne-Candy and many other old Army outcasts spend their hours, capturing the old man and winning the war game before it begins. This triggers a spirited argument between the two warriors, Wilson insisting that old, traditional conservative men like Wynne-Candy aren't merely out of touch, but acutely dangerous in this new sort of warfare. Chastened and annoyed, the old man finds himself drifting into an extended flashback that rewinds to that same Turkish bath, 41 years prior, when he was just Lieutenant Clive Candy, on leave from the Second Boer War - the flawlessly-executed trick by which a youthful body double substitutes for Livesey in his old age makeup while the camera manages to get slightly too far ahead of the character is the first of many coups du cinéma in the film, seamlessly blurring past and present into one discontinuous chronology that doubles as the first leg in the filmmakers' argument about the way that the past informs the present.

The remainder of the film is largely concerned with three movements, one during the Boer War, one in the days immediately following the First World War, and one in the early years of the Second World War, bringing us finally back to the morning of the day on which we met Candy. In each of these segments, we also see Candy's developing relationship with Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook), a German officer with whom Candy duels in 1901, while he's in Berlin on an unofficial mission to defuse an anti-British propaganda effort. And we see as well his encounters with three young women who all look exactly alike, for the good reason that they're all played by Deborah Kerr: Edith Hunter, an idealist who obviously loves Candy but ends up marrying Kretschmar-Schldorff; Barbara Wynne, a pragmatic nurse who marries Candy despite his being much older; and Angela "Johnny" Cannon, who serves as his sharp-tongued assistant and driver as he works with the Home Guard, and ends up helping to bridge the gulf between the honorably conservative Brit and the honorably conservative German while their countries prepare to go to war.

While each sequence is hung on a single driving narrative spine, the overall impression is of a movie that meanders its way through history over the course of two hours and 43 minutes (the film was cut twice before being restored to its full length in 1983; a more thorough clean-up job restoring the vivid colors was completed in 2011), and yet never feels like there's a single sagging moment or unnecessary layover. The script is thoughtful and decisive, crisply marking down character beats for the actors to later flesh in, and presenting symbolic conflicts which feel so personal in their execution that the degree to which this is all a metaphorical satire of British military etiquette hardly gets in the way of what a perfect study of individual lives it is as well. And I will give it this above even A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes and all the rest: it is very possible that this is the best-written of the Archers' film, structurally, psychologically, and thematically. As it cycles back into 1942 and presents its message that men of Candy's era, for all their dignity and experience and intelligence, aren't equipped to fight a war against the systemic evil represented by Nazi Germany, the film generates a fierce passion about its topic mixed with affection, deep and rich and abiding affection, for the characters it's consigning to history. For something with such a serious subject, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp moves forward with enormous generosity and a great deal of fresh, bubbly humor - indeed, it is as much a comedy as otherwise, growing gradually darker towards the end.

The beautiful writing goes hand in hand with exemplary filmmaking technique that draws it out and works it into the visual bones of the movie. It is supremely well made, and not always because it draws attention to itself: one of the most perfect sequences in the movie consists of a camera staring at Walbrook's face as he quietly delivers a deep, probing monologue, pushing into a close-up, and then backing away again. It's so simple as to be virtually anti-cinematic, but it's exactly what the movie needs, both for the integrity of the monologue, and the place it occupies near the very beginning of the 1939 sequence; it promises the seriousness and mournful intimacy that the rest of the film will largely concern itself with, in opposition to the more bright material of the first two-thirds.

Frequently, though, the style is so great precisely because it makes itself felt. There is the comic audacity of the first transition from the Boer War to the First World War, a montage of mounted animal heads representing Candy's somewhat bloodthirsty approach to leisure time until he can get back to business (ending with the nihilistic joke of a Germany army helmet with the descriptive plaque "Hun - Flanders, 1918"); there is the bleak poetry of the second transition from the First World War to the Second, with the Wynne-Candy family album skipping through blank page after blank page following the newspaper clipping of Barbara's death. And there is the richness and moral complexity of the individual images, shot in glowing Technicolor to accentuate the vibrancy of military uniforms and upper class splendor in sharp contrast to default setting of drab earth tones, suggesting throughout (but especially in the Boer War sequence) that the pageantry of the British military and the pride of men like Candy, however handsome and captivating, is also chintzy and surface-level, all glamor without soul. Or consider the way that Powell presents the duel that takes up a huge portion of the first act: the opening preparations are contained within a hollow wide shot of a gymnasium, like a dead cathedral of Continental honor; the actual duel starts during a high-angle crane shot that backs away as Allan Gray's jaunty score kicks in, suggesting a perverse ballet, all part of the theatricality of the lives it presents, before dissolving into a snowstorm.

The visuals are, throughout, sardonic and witty, detached with just enough ghostliness that they feel appropriately out of time and yet anchored by the superbly expressive faces of Livesey and Walbrook that the immediate feeling of the characters' lives is always front and center. The images are satiric while the script is utterly sincere, and the structure is moody and weary while the energy of each scene and each performance is fiery and urgent, communicating with an intensity that could only driven by enthusiastic and greatly concerned patriots in a time of war. Of course the film hasn't aged well: this is carbon-stamped to 1943 as firmly as a movie could possibly be. And yet its insights into how history moves and what role people occupy in it are utterly timeless. As a time capsule and as pure cinema, this is as as essential, enjoyable, and challenging as the movies can get.

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IT IS A VERY PLUM PLUM

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

The big problem with The English Patient isn't even its fault: the problem is that Elaine Benes fucking hated it, and nobody who saw that 1997 episode of the sitcom Seinfeld before they caught up with the Oscar-worshiped romantic epic could possibly avoid hearing any echo of Julia Louis-Dreyfus's passionately anguished delivery of her character's rants. "Sex in a tub! That doesn't work!" or the incensed "Quit telling your stupid story about the stupid desert, and just die already! Die!" I will confess that, years and years before I first say the movie in the mid-'00s, I was prepared from that one line to find it unendurably stretched-thin and pokey, on top of already having my knives out from the film that swept the Academy Awards for 1996 when, if the universe were just, Secret & Lies and Fargo would have fought it out for all of the trophies everywhere. Is it any wonder, then, that it met my expectations?

Revisiting the film twice since than has softened me towards it, though I still can't say I love it; of director Anthony Minghella's picture postcard literary adaptations, I would rank it behind The Talented Mr. Ripley in every respect. It is, after all, quite a lot of movie, two hours and 42 minutes' worth, and the more movie you have, the greater the chances that not all of it will work equally well. I've found, generally speaking, that people who like The English Patient but don't adore it tend to cluster into two camps, based around which half of it is better: the "present day" plotline, or the "flashback" plotline, with the tacit implication that it would be better for all concerned if it could have gotten by without necessarily having to spend so much time on both of them. I happen to be a member of the "present day" camp, which is in no small part because I am also a member of the "Juliette Binoche is the best actress of the 1990s, and I really like you, Kristen Scott Thomas, but I'm sorry, just not that much" camp.

As adapted by Minghella from Michael Ondaatje's novel, The English Patient, broadly speaking, tells two love stories that play out during the Second World War, one in the beginning of the war, the other in its waning days. The action radiates backward from an Italian monastery that barely remains standing after years of fighting, currently serving as a field hospital. Here, Québécoise nurse Hana (Binoche) tends to a terribly burned English patient (Ralph Fiennes), who remembers neither his name nor his story. But as he slowly doles out what he does know, to Hana and to David Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), another Canadian recuperating in the area, he learn the full version of his history, the one he either does not or cannot access himself. He is, it turns out, the Hungarian Count Laszlo de Almásy, and at the time war broke out in the late 1930s, he was mapping the Sahara Desert for the British government, alongside an Englishman named Madox (Julian Wadham). Their expedition is joined by the married Cliftons, Katharine (Scott Thomas) and Geoffrey (Colin Firth), and Almásy and Katharine soon strike up a love affair that ebbs and flows during those tense times in North Africa. Back in 1945, while Hana tends to Almásy and hears his story, she meets Kip (Naveen Andrews), a Sikh engineer in the British Army, and has a much less torrid, heaving, and sandy affair of her own.

The English Patient is a film of particular bigness, as Minghella splashes all the grandeur of the Sahara and North Africa across his screen in dauntingly orange landscape shots and more domestic scenes that lovingly foreground Stuart Craig's heavily detailed, lived-in production design. And it is also a film of great and subtle intimacy, relying extensively on close-ups of Fiennes and Scott Thomas. This mix is the film's biggest aesthetic strength, putting it somewhere on the spectrum of great psychological epics on the Lawrence of Arabia model, movies that successfully use an enormous canvas to paint a human-sized portrait (there are few of these that are genuinely good than you might hope for). But if I allow my inner Elaine to pipe up, it's also monotonous: there simply isn't much incident to stretch out to 162 minutes. Individually, many of the component scenes of The English Patient are miracles of mythic filmmaking: the sequence in which Almásy carries Katharine from a plane crash to the safety of some distant caves is Epic Cinema 101. But these great moments are separated by longueurs that do absolutely nothing but restate things we already knew, and though Scott Thomas was never better at inhabiting the space in front of the camera with casual sensual force than she was in this production, any movie that consists for seemingly half of its running time of watching two people smolder at each other is a movie that needs to answer some tough questions about its priorities.

That's part of why I prefer the framework with Hana and Kip and David: it feels more consequential, more rooted in historical context, and more driven. None of this is accidental, mind you. An important part of Minghella's strategy in the film is to contrast the relatively straightforward, plain, and tangible "now" story with the heated, highly subjective and abstracted "then" story, which is meant to work as a hazy dream of physical memory and emotional states - it is an impressionistic approach rather than a narrative one, nimbly aided by cinematographer John Seale and composer Gabriel Yared, the most important members of the filmmaking team for helping to construct that kind of detached High Romantic atmosphere of feeling rather than observing. And I admire this. But I would admire 50 minutes of it every bit as much as I admire two hours of it.

The Italian framework, meanwhile, is much less showy, but for my tastes, much more meaningful. While Scott Thomas and Fiennes are stuck playing concepts of erotic psychology, Binoche simply gets to play a human being, and she's better in her role than either of them (Andrews is the best member of the cast every time he opens his mouth, but in a limited part that has been weirdly slashed down from its importance in the source novel). And instead of the heaving visual overstimulation of the Eternal Desert, it takes place in a perfectly realised, deeply physical space, one in which the use of color and framing and slowness do a superb job of evoking the feel of cool, damp air, and the rough texture of ancient brick and stone. If the romantic flashback segments of film are an evocation of the way we remember places and physical sensation, the framework evoke feeling things and being in places right now. And coupled with the more down-to-earth characterisations and performances, I find all of that to be more satisfying.

That all being said, The English Patient is exactly the kind of movie that feels like it ought to have an enormously passionate fanbase - it is an intense, lush experience that hits right in the gut, while the films I will eternally check it against, Fargo and Secrets & Lies, take dead aim at the brain and allow the libido to shrivel up unattended. The English Patient is utterly gorgeous, and it's lusty and sexy in a very literate, classy way - the R-rated Miramax equivalent to the star-studded, posh European superproductions of the 1960s. There's a lot to be said for that, even when the results are the kind of half-baked and over-baked confection that this particular film turns out to be. I do find it all a bit tiring rather than exhilarating, and I can't imagine that's what the filmmakers had in mind, but I absolutely do respect the top-to-bottom commitment to making this movie the most fleshed-out version of itself possible. It's an enormous, indulgent beast, but it's completely honest about it.

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JUST REMEMBER THE UNCANNY VALLEY

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

The 2001 video game adaptation Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is a bad movie. I apologise for the redundancy. But it's not just bad, the way that other entries in its peculiarly benighted subgenre are, like Lara Croft: Tomb Raider or BloodRayne. Or Street Fighter or Wing Commander. Or Super Mario Bros. It is a bad film that swings between the inordinately awful, the merely crummy, and even the genuinely good in a wild confusion. We cannot, for example, bluntly declare "it's an ugly movie", even though its ugliness is pervasive and surely the individually most important reason that it's also bad. Parts of it are as beautifully-designed and executed as anything in an animated feature from the 2000s. And the only reason it's so damn ugly is because it's so damn ambitious.

The thing about The Spirits Within - which has absolutely no connection to the nine games in the main Final Fantasy series (Final Fantasy X released just over a week after the film opened), nor any of that series' spin-offs, except for a character called Sid (though its spelled "Cid" in the English localisations of the games) - is that it was as much a proof of concept and technical exercise as it was an attempt to make a narrative film. The idea behind it was to make the first photo-realistic CGI humans in feature-length cinema, six years after Toy Story birthed the fully-rendered CG feature by including hideous deformities where its human characters should have gone. Actually, that's much too small a way of putting the film's ambitions: The Spirits Within was meant to create a whole new paradigm in movie acting, creating in its main character a CG "actress" who would show up in film after film, both live-action and animated, who would come to feel like a real movie star in her own right.

This did not come even close to happening, and most of the aesthetic technique that The Spirits Within pioneered turned out to be an immediate dead end. The film was a big flop, one that shuttered the new film division of video game publisher Square almost in the same breath that it opened it, and very nearly wrecked the company's planned merger with fellow software company Enix, now wary of linking its fortunes to company with such a high-profile failure. Worse still, the much-ballyhooed new style was a complete wash: The Spirits Within is a handsome movie in almost every way except for its photorealistic characters, who remain 14 years later the leading citizens of the Uncanny Valley, that place where the visually accurate representation of humans runs into the barely-not-right animation of their bodies and features, and gives everybody watching a screaming case of the heebie-jeebies. Far from triggering a new generation of computer-generated movie stars, The Spirits Within decisively proved that all-CG characters had better stay in the realm of pure fantasy, like the frog-man Jar-Jar Binks of Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, or better still, the skeletal subhuman Gollum of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, released a year and a half after The Spirits Within, and a triumph in exactly the ways that The Spirits Within failed.

Ironically, for a film whose cast is so uniformly soulless, The Spirits Within is all about souls. The somewhat baffling story, freely mixing spiritualism and hard science in a way that feels quintessentially JPRG-ish (though the script, which was in English for maximum profit potential, was by Al Reinert & Jeff Vintar, the story was by Final Fantasy creator and series guardian Sakaguchi Horonobu, who also directed), is about the race of alien beings that have taken over most of Earth's surface by 2065, and assault and kill humans by eating our spirits. Which you can see as they're pulled out of our bodies, with your naked eye and all. Dr. Aki Ross (Ming-Na Wen) and her mentor Dr. Sid (Donald Sutherland) are busily working on a plan to fight these Phantoms by collecting eight elemental crystals alien spirits which will both cure Aki of her Phantom infection - the reason she's uniquely able to track down the target spirits - and help awaken Gaia, the spirit of Earth itself, to neutralise the Phantoms. Reluctantly helping them are Aki's former lover Captain Gray Edwards (Alec Baldwin), and his team of colorful soldiers, Ryan Whittaker (Ving Rhames), Neil Fleming (Steve Buscemi), and Jane Proudfoot (Peri Gilpin). And they have to work fast: they're being constantly stymied by the vicious General Hein (James Woods), who regards Aki's Phantom connection as proof that she can't be trusted, and just wants to blow the Phantoms apart with his giant space laser.

It would be charitable to describe the film's storyline as mildly confusing: the mixture of random spirituality and space marine clichés results in an irreconcilable collage of ideas and tones that lurches from heady discussions of New Age arcana bolted to technobabble, right into noisy action sequences, and then into moody expressions of creeping horrifying dread. The way to get through it, I have found on two occasions now, is to stop wanting the story to click along normally, and just go with whatever seems to be happening onscreen in the moment; ultimately, it always comes back to Hein being wicked and Gray shouting out exposition and looking sidelong at Aki, and it's easy enough to parse that as a thoroughly generic sci-fi action adventure. "Get through it", I say, not "find it marvelously enjoyable". In faith, The Spirits Within always feels a bit musty and overfamiliar, it's just that its individually musty elements jar with each other in inscrutable ways.

Which leaves us not with a particularly edifying story to sit through, but a series of visual spaces to watch unfold - it is a video game adaptation, after all. And fair's fair, the design of those spaces is absolutely exquisite. The film's evocation of a ruined Earth, turned into a literal alien graveyard, includes almost nothing but gorgeous backgrounds, full of hectically cobbled-together tech, flinty militarism, and an apocalyptic sweep in places. The Phantoms themselves are amazing-looking creations, translucent orange forms that flow and glide through the action with abstract beauty that offsets the inhuman horror of their design, which is usually spotted in brief snatches so that it never grows too comfortable.

And yet, what is this marvelous world populated with? Plastic zombies. In an early use of motion capture, the human cast of The Spirits Within tends towards stiffness in their actions that clashes oddly with their elaborately detailed and free-flowing hair, but that's not really the thing that leaps out of the screen to devour your brain from the inside. For that, we needs must look instead to their faces, which are subtle horrors, but abiding ones. You'd not be able to pick it out in a still shot; other than the matte flatness of their eyes, these are photo-realistic creations. In motion, they are living nightmares. It's the skin, above all else: there isn't a millimeter of squash and stretch in the characters' exposed flesh, which doesn't stretch, or wiggle, or move at all - it's at its most obvious in something like the vein on Dr. Sid's scalp, which sits there, flat and cold and motionless, like an iron cord stapled to his head. But it's at its worst whenever a character moves their jaw, and their face gives way while their cheeks stay rigid and flat. It's so hideous that it almost doesn't even register that the mouth movements don't meaningfully line up with the spoken dialogue most of the time, so in addition to watching faces move the way faces can't, we're also watching mouths flap around like dead puppets being waggled by a monstrous and perverse unseen puppetmaster.

I don't care how beautiful the design and compelling the world; and it wouldn't matter in the least if the story were a captivating masterpiece of curlicuing plot and piercing insight into the human condition. As long as the protagonists looked like that (Aki gets a bit more work put into her, but mostly at the level of texture and eye movement), The Spirits Within could never work as a motion picture. It is viscerally off-putting. The fascinating thing about it, is that for all that it horrifies me to watch more than a couple of minutes of it in a row, I am terribly glad the movie exists; it's like absolutely no other feature that I've ever encountered or even heard of, and its ambition is off the charts. This is the kind of severely disturbing dysfunction that only comes from pushing the envelope much too far, much too fast - all these years later, and we're still not caught up to the place where The Spirits Within wanted to get to in one step. It's absolutely one-of-a-kind, the perfect cinematic embodiment of Hunter S. Thompson's "Too weird to live, too rare to die", and in all its beautiful spectacle and skin-crawling ugliness, it is very much something that should be at least sampled, just for a taste of it. Because this film exists, we get to know what that kind of thing would look like; and better yet, because it exists, we know that we want to stay the hell away from that kind of thing, and why.

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YOU MAGNIFICENT BASTARD

With what I can only call the most admirable clarity, the monumental biopic Patton, Best Picture Oscar winner of 1970, opens with a kind of thesis statement that lays out everything the rest of the film is to contain. I don’t refer to the main body of its legendary opening scene, in which famed World War II hero Gen. George S. Patton, Jr. (George C. Scott) stands in front of an enormous U.S. flag to deliver a rousing message to the unseen troops about the inherent nobility and bravery of the American fighting forces. It’s less a patriotic harangue than a revival meeting centered around the religion of blood and killing. That is a great scene, and it does perfectly set the stage for all that comes after, but it’s not what I’m referring to.

I refer to the short beat that precedes his speech. We see Patton emerge in a long shot, a tiny black blip against the field of red and white, followed by a series of cuts that swiftly bring the camera in closer, after which several seconds are spent cutting metronomically from one visual element of this man’s heavily polished exterior to the next: his ivory-handled pistol, his medals, the insignia on his helmet, his rigid salute, his pristine boots. In this moment, director Franklin J. Schaffner and editor Hugh S. Fowler (both Oscar winners for this film) aren’t merely communicating that these are the elements that go into making this man; they’re arguing that these elements are this man, that he is defined entirely as individual components of perfect military bearing. That matters more, to him and to the viewer, than anything to do with his internal humanity. And only once we’ve quickly absorbed all of that does the film move into its legendary opening monologue, where he clarifies that first impression with his impassioned hymn to being the biggest, toughest sonofabitch you can be. Not, in any sense, to being the finest human being.

Scott, according to at least one story, was nervous about this opening, concerned that it was so potent that it would overwhelm the rest of his performance. That at, least, doesn’t happen, but he was almost right; the opening does tend to overwhelm Patton the movie, which has the somewhat unfortunate characteristic of having told us, in its opening and strongest scene, exactly what it’s going to be about for the rest of the film. And at 172 minutes total, the rest of the film is quite long to feel like it’s only ever providing variations on a single theme that’s never clearer than when we start off. There’s a kind of weirdly academic texture to the screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola (who would have much better success directing a three-hour Best Picture winner just two years down the road) and Edmund H. North, which plainly yearns to be a complete and thorough study of an all-time fascinating real-life human, using war less as its plot than as the prism through which its central character is refracted. And it even manages to be that, but Coppola and North are so successful at quickly sketching an outline, and then filling it in with smartly implied and gracefully stated exposition, that we have learned virtually all we will ever learn about Patton before the film is even a third of the way through.

I find much about the film - its expansive length, its focus on psychology during wartime, the central position of a title character who wants above all else to be thought of as a warrior, not a man - to evoke Lawrence of Arabia, then eight years old. That film carefully danced around its protagonist, peeling him like an onion, so that we kept learning new things about him all the way till the end; Patton ends up having to repeat itself, constantly, to hoist itself up to a running time that seems preposterously out-of-place. There is no fact about Patton that we only learn one time. There’s even an entire subthread of scenes taking place in the offices of the Nazi army command dedicated solely to demonstrating that the Germans realise the same things about Patton that the viewers already know. If there had been no other change to Patton but to surgically excise all the scenes involving Germans, it would be infinitely more focused and tight. For not only do the Nazi command scenes serve no meaningful function, they also don’t fit a movie that’s intently concerned on the way that American military men perceive the world.

That all being said, and no matter how reliably Patton leaves me feeling exhausted and, if I must be honest, quite a bit bored, the fact remains that the character it studies is a genuinely fascinating, remarkable figure, one of the most interesting subjects in the history of the biopic. Partially, this is because Patton himself was such a profoundly strange man, colorful and brazen and full of messy self-contradictions. A devout Christian who believed in reincarnation and worshiped the great military minds of the pre-Christian world, a martinet and bully who almost scuttled his entire career for abusing a shell-shocked soldier, an orator who carefully laced blunt profanity into his speeches as a way of making himself seem more erratic and giving his words more memorable tang, and a demented war-hungry genius whose refusal to slow down or play by the rules proved decisive in helping the Allies win the war in Europe. The writers, in pinning this man down on paper, prove to have an immensely ambivalent and confused attitude towards him, which ends up being one of the film’s best strengths - uncertain whether to condemn his bloodlust and my-way-or-the-highway braggadocio, or to cheer for his rebellious instincts, mystified by his adoration of classicism, anxious to praise him as a hero, but alarmed at supporting unchecked American militarism while Vietnam was still burning, Coppola and North never decide on a single approach to the character, which frees Patton from having the simple “you should think this” moralising that tends to make so many biopics so bland and harmless. No doubt, the fact that they were working mostly with the accounts of Gen. Omar Bradley, a bitter rival of Patton’s and eventually his commanding officer, led to this split between hero worship and anti-hero condemnation (it also likely explains why Bradley - played with level warmth by Karl Malden - comes off as so damn humane and reasonable throughout the film, in a way that strikes me as a bit intellectually and ethically questionable).

Its overall ambivalence crops up in many ways: Schaffner’s direction, which keeps the war itself at enough of a remove, and always privileges people talking about strategy rather than executing it, and thus silently reminding us that Patton, great warrior man, was still a general and thus still kept himself back from the heart of fighting; Jerry Goldsmith’s score - one of the few Oscar nominations the film lost, and one of the few it unambiguously deserved to win - which presents rousing military marches that feel like more fully-orchestrated fife and drum tunes from the Revolutionary War, punctuating them with a repeated motif of echoing horn triplets that feel entirely out-of-place and mournful. Though the film was seen as the moderate, middlebrow champion in the year that MASH was a more robustly anti-war Oscar nominee, and Richard Nixon adored it, Patton feels more of a piece with the New Hollywood than its bloat and aesthetic conservatism imply - it has the same lack of clear moral authority and obsession with the ways that men express themselves within a culture where they don’t fit that are typical of more showily radical American films of the same time.

And, like many of those films, it demands a lot of its main actor and relies on him to provide complexity and richness that an only be indicated by the script. So it works out well that George C. Scott came along and gave such an absurdly strong performance. Really, take out the actor, and Patton is much less insightful, and its bloat becomes unforgivable; but put him in, and suddenly even the most logy moments hum with dramatic tension. Scott is a marvel, vanishing completely into the role, and building a rock-solid foundation for Patton’s endless self-confidence and violent certitude that leaves his every action feeling like the inevitable extension of that mind into the wrong time and place, where he is nevertheless able to thrive. Never a small man, Scott towers over everyone and everything in the film, physically and emotionally; he has no little moments, but finds a way to make even quiet reflection the burly explosion of a volatile personality (the famed "2000 years ago... I was here" scene, in particular, is at once spiritual, self-consciously mythic, and presented with an aggressive "fuck you, I dare you to tell me I'm being weird" bullishness). And in his big moments, he exudes crushing, giant emotions with terrifying splendor, as in his wrathful verbal assault against that shell-shocked soldier that Scott turns into Lear-like scream of defiance against a world where things exist that Patton does not approve of.

Scott makes for such an unstoppably watchable Patton that, even though the script offers him little chance in the middle hour to do anything he didn't already do in the first, and only lets him start to project introspection towards the end, he makes every single onscreen moment feels like the most vital thing you have ever seen in a movie. Patton, on the whole is handsome prestige cinema that's executed well enough, looks swell - Fred J. Koenekamp's cinematography, the second and last film shot in the Dimension 150 format, lends a faded beauty that speaks to the subject's mythic stature and his behind-the-times attitudes alike - and has plenty of smart writing (just too damn much of it), but when Scott is added to the equation, it suddenly turns into a genuinely great character study. Not "Best Picture of 1970 or any other year" great, but far better and more involving than it easily might have been.

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IT'S A HELL OF A THING, KILLING A MAN

It seems irresponsible to review American Sniper without doing so through the lens of the enormous cultural conversation surrounding it, but having actually seen the damn movie, it strikes me as rather bizarre that so many tens of thousands of words have already been spent discussing it without most of them being, y'know, accurate. Given the parameters of The Dialogue around the movie being so divorced from what seems to me to be its reality, I don't even know how to engage with that dialogue. So sadly, I'm just going to have to treat this like a movie that happened to come out, that I happened to see, and we'll all have to pretend that it hasn't already been buried under a mountain of essays from all corners of the political spectrum.

So, American Sniper: Clint Eastwood's most thought-through, well-mounted, and thematically snug movie since Letters from Iwo Jima, centered on what is far and away the most subtle, insightful, and nuanced performance that Bradley Cooper has ever given. Indeed, I can't think of an Eastwood film since The Bridges of Madison County which so successfully foregrounds an actor and banks everything else on that actor's performance doing work that would be impossible if the film tried to approach it any other way. For American Sniper is, first and above all, about a man who wants to turn himself into a machine; a man born into a value system in a nation at a time where his sense of right demands that he give up a certain measure of his humanity for The Greater Good, and it resides entirely upon Cooper's performance to communicate what that entails. That, and one scene where Jason Hall's screenplay drops a broad-ass line to the effect of "aren't you even human any more?" into the mouth of the main character's wife, but by Eastwood movie standards, that's almost inscrutably subtle.

The film is adapted from the memoirs of Chris Kyle, self-aggrandising "most lethal sniper in U.S. military history", though the filmmakers are content to reconfigure him as necessary to make the movie they want to. It's impossible to fathom Cooper's version of Kyle bragging in print about slugging Jesse Ventura, or whatever the hell it was; when he's praised as "the Legend", or reminded of his career kill count, he adopts a pleasant but blank expression that communicates "that's so nice of you and can we maybe talk about anything else?" with the silent pleading of a man who's much better at avoiding talking about things than acknowledging them. It's the cousin to the expression he wears when his Stateside wife, Taya (Sienna Miller) talks about how much she and their kids just love it when he's home; the facial vocabulary of a man who doesn't like feeling emotions and thinking about himself, and found that transforming himself into a military killing machine facilitated that non-feeling. The real-life Kyle has, in other words, been retrofitted into a perfect Eastwood protagonist, the clearest of all descendants from Will Munny in the director's 1992 Western Unforgiven. He even delivers the Munny-esque line "It's a heckuva thing to stop a beating heart" when taking his son out deer hunting, late in the film, delivered without Munny's world-weary fatigue. For that would require introspection, and introspection is something Kyle is thoroughly incapable of performing.

American Sniper illustrates Kyle's mind by fully settling into his warrior POV (which doesn't require or imply that it adopts his opinions as its own, but I've resigned myself to waiting until 2025 or so to start that fight), which to begin with, results in a pretty ingenious structure for a pretty conventional biopic. The opening 20 or 25 minutes start with the future deadliest of all possible snipers about to pull the trigger on his first human victim and then flashing back to race through a potted history of his life prior to the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks, glancing at the Big Obvious Signpost moments like it can't wait to get back to Fallujah, Iraq. It then spends time meandering through his four separate tours in-country, with Eastwood's characteristic bleached-out cinematography, courtesy of his regular DP Tom Stern, serving as it customarily does to strip all of the sentiment out of a scenario that barely had any to begin with. When Kyle goes home, he spends just enough time with his wife for her to just barely make an impression on us (I have never, ever had much use for Miller before, but the particular impact she makes is so profound with so little screentime that I'm not likely to doubt her again in the near future), and he's always back for another tour without a scene depicting his decision or his attempt to sell Taya on its merits. In short, the story won't engage with interpersonal conflict, it blasts through all of the explanatory history that might give us some insight into the protagonist, and it ignores everything in its haste to get back to war. And that is what I mean by settling into Kyle's POV.

The filmmaking reinforces this: the excellent sound mix especially, with its layers upon layers of explosions and gunshots at multiple distances from multiple directions. But the editing by Joel Cox and Gary D. Roach (also Eastwood regulars) is equally on-point, charging ahead during the overt action scenes and giving the more languid chatting non-combat scenes an erratic vigor, a constant sense that even if we're relaxed now, we're still in the middle of a fucking war zone. And then there's the more direct matter of how the film frankly depicts the messy suddenness of human death by bullets, small geysers of crimson that pop out of human bodies, Iraqi and American alike, with unromantic proficiency, leaving nothing to the imagination. It does not, by any measure I'm able to recognise, suggest that being in war is exciting - unlike the very similar The Hurt Locker, nothing in American Sniper suggests that Kyle is an adrenaline junkie or flirts with a death wish - and the increasingly washed-out expressions on Cooper's face, coupled with the unyielding desaturation of the images, clearly indicate that it's taking a lot out of Kyle to be in that environment.

The question the movie focuses on, then, is why he's there, and why he keeps going back; why, after having killed a child right off the bat, he'd keep placing himself in a position where his only task is to keep killing and killing. The best scene in the film shows Kyle training his scope on a little boy wandering around an RPG launcher, quietly begging him not to pick up the weapon: not wanting to shoot another child, feeling visibly sick at the thought of killing another child, and yet it plainly does not occur to him as an option not to kill the child if it comes down to it. Why does Kyle do this, the film silently asks, and then it even more silently answers: because he doesn't have the imagination to conceive of anything outside of the moral code he has always lived by, even when it causes him anguish, even when his wife - importantly, the only other human in the film given even the vaguest semblance of an inner life - tells him straight to his face that his beliefs are wrong and causing pain, even when his great "I shall be a hero and slay the dragon" moment is reckless and ends up putting the exact same American soldiers he was "heroically" saving into more active danger than if he'd just sat there and done nothing at all. He wanted to turn himself into a machine, and he succeeded in doing so, and the movie stares at him without judgment or praise as he goes about that process. And when his refusal to look inside himself means that he can neither acknowledge privately nor even consider as a possibility the reality that the actions he has committed and the actions he has witnessed have caused him to suffer from PTSD, the movie stars non-judgmentally at that, too. But the longer it goes on, the more it trusts us to see that disorder peering out from behind Cooper's increasingly flat eyes, and understand that his desire to avoid human feeling is increasingly a desire to avoid naming his own suffering and thus his own perceived weakness.

All of which makes it epically frustrating when the movie ends by descending into a maudlin, arch-biopic sequence of leading up to Kyle's death while back home in Texas, playing as a straightfaced version of the same "life is happening!" montage that's used to such mercilessly ironic effect in the film's opening, and ending on the corniest "he's off to meet his death!" scene since the penultimate scene in 2012's Lincoln. And having thus pointlessly fucked his own movie, Eastwood doubles-down with a travesty of a montage of images from the real-life Kyle's funeral and memorial services, a sequence that's exploitative to begin with, and also moonily plays up the notion that this was an unambiguously wonderful man whose passing is much to be mourned, which is found nowhere else in the movie, and indeed is almost exactly contradicted by its persuasive argument that this was a prickly man whose refusal to look inside himself caused only suffering in himself and others. It's a different, vastly worse movie - the movie, in fact, that American Sniper has been accused of being (by liberals) and praised for being (by conservatives), but that it emphatically isn't for some 127 of its 132 minutes. But oh me, oh my, how shittily pandering those five minutes are.

Meanwhile, is it racist? Not really, but it doesn't do a very good job of inoculating itself against that charge - there's one scene in particular, involving a made-up insurgent assassin with a penchant for drills, that doesn't do serve any meaningful narrative purpose and provides almost the entire basis for the argument that the film as a whole presents the Iraqi people as bloodthirsty brutes; and even that isn't quite a slam dunk 1+1=2 piece of evidence, given context. Mostly, though, American Sniper simply doesn't care very much one way or another about the people of Iraq; an apparently damning statement, until we mention as well that it doesn't care one way or another about any American, citizen or soldier, whose surname isn't "Kyle". This is a character study, not a political statement, and the only real sin it commits is presenting that study in a framework that is entirely impossible to strip of politics, and could only be perceived otherwise by somebody with a reflextive America-centric worldview. A sin that somehow didn't taint the equally apolitical Hurt Locker, despite that film actually coming out when the Iraq War was still officially ongoing.

That being said, it's a marvelous, marvelous character study, driven by a superb central performance and unpolished, spare filmmaking and writing that allow that performance to be the motive force of everything else the film does and is. Some of what it is, is ambivalent to the point of being problematic; a tiny bit of what it is, is acutely vile; and most of what it is, is a smart, complex portrait of a largely fictional man who desperately wanted not to be complex at all. What the film's reception reveals about American culture is uniformly discouraging and depressing, but as a two-and-a-quarter-hour piece of cinema made by an inconsistently great director who got his mojo back in a huge way after too many years of burnished mediocrity, I come about thiiiis close to loving American Sniper, and even with its ugly-ass flaws, I wouldn't trade it away for anything.

8/10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5/10

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

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

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2004: In which new technologies and ancient storytelling forms are once again uncertainly wed

There was, to begin with, Braveheart. That film's depiction of violent, manly battles in an undifferentiated Olden Days setting begat Gladiator, and between the two of them, the five Oscars each of them won (overlapping only on Best Picture - they didn't even win the same Sound award), and the huge amount of money Gladiator made along the way, the pair managed to resurrect the old-fashioned historical action epic for the 21st Century. Add in Peter Jackson's massive box office juggernaut of The Lord of the Rings, and the surprise is not that a genre left for dead in the 1960s was revived, but there weren't more of the things (they never became quite the self-perpetuating machine of Ancient World epics in the 1960s, when they helped to kill the Hollywood system as it existed then, but they have still not died off, only slowed to reliable drip of one every year or two).

We arrive now at a particularly time-stamped version of the trend, from 2004. It was the year that the splashy failure of Oliver Stone's Alexander reminded everybody of why they'd stopped making the things in the first place; but before that could happen, the historical epic about men with swords battling other men with swords in battle scenes that look very much like the battle scenes in a lot of other movies had a major international hit with Wolfgang Petersen's Troy, a men's shampoo ad in the form of an adaptation of The Iliad that would have had to work a hell of a lot harder to miss the point of The Iliad any more thoroughly. It is, to begin with, a "realistic" version of the founding work of Western literature, one of the reasons it so clearly identifies itself as a product of the mid-'00s (and later, of course; 2014 pops in to say hi, and make sure everybody is excited about seeing Exodus: Gods and Kings), right down to the way that "realism" badly needs those square quotes. It's not just telling a heavily mythological story with all the myth ripped out artlessly; it's treating the plot and characters with a thoughtless presentism that front-loads modern attitudes into a framework that is flawlessly designed to express the mores and concerns of a society whose values were very, very different than ours. It's one thing for Troy to be a blunt-force indictment of the George W. Bush administration and its gallop towards war in Iraq; that's the kind of interpretation of classic texts through modern prisms that has been going on for centuries, with Homer's epics serving as particularly fertile fodder for such exercises. It's quite another for it to re-imagine most of its characters into such psychologically contemporary figures that the plot, hinging on ancient notions of duty, honor, and value, can barely function in the wake of it.

And so, instead of the rage of Achilles, Peleus's son, driven by the love of glory and prideful in his semi-divinity we get the sullen moping of Achilles, anachronistically obsessed with political justice and played by a disastrously out-of-his-depths Brad Pitt as a mournful, introspective sort who hates war passionately, and hates himself for being good at it. That's a fine character for a movie about a bloody, pointless war. It is not, however, a fine character for a movie about ancient Greece, and Pitt's woeful performance is merely the point of the spear, leading the way for the rest of a movie that cannot pretend, except in the solitary performance of Peter O'Toole as Priam, that it takes place in a pre-modern era. The things people say, and the way they say them, the relationships between characters, the general sensitivity and weepy psychoanalysing that courses through every performance and character, these are not the stuff of heightened historical fiction. They are the stuff of a drama about people in 2004, who happen to be wearing old-fashioned costumes and wandering around on sets that evoke something that's close enough to the ancient world that it probably doesn't matter where or when in the ancient world, specifically.

But then, the point of Troy is not to bring history to life, but to bring battles to life, which it does with impersonal efficiency. Wolfgang Petersen is not the greatest of all directors, but he was rarely if ever so mirthlessly functional in his shepherding of a movie through its paces. To have seen any of the LOTR movies is to have seen the best of Troy's action, and even that's an unfair comparison; unfair to LOTR, anyway. Between the instant-tanner hue of Roger Pratt's cinematography (taking the concept of the Bronze Age just a little too far) and the patent inauthenticity of the CGI armies, the film's action looks chintzy and far more slapdash and cheap than I am certain must have been the case. But that's what happens when you blankly copy everything without knowing why: other than their colors, the battles couldn't possibly evoke Braveheart more than they do in the rhythm of the cutting or the framing of shots, and even James Horner's score openly pilfers from his music in that film, in exactly the same places (sometimes, when he is bored, he steals a little bit from his Willow score instead). Except that, where Mel Gibson's filmmaking was driven by God knows what demons that pushed him to craft his film with an energy that vibrates right off the screen; Petersen's was driven by the observation that he could copy Gibson. Or Peter Jackson, or Ridley Scott, or pick it.

As a result, Troy has only the most desultory action, filmed with a good sense of size but none at all of drama: perversely, when we can see Greek boats filling the entire anamorphic frame, it ceases to be impressive, because there's no scale or comparison. It just becomes graphically arbitrary lines and colors at a certain point, and Troy makes a habit of finding that point and squatting there, unmoving, until it has exhausted its supply of effects animators for the time being.

Even so, the action is always, always better than the human drama, which presents a team of actors ranging from the sublimely talented to the barely adequate, all mashed down to the same level of banality by a litany of lines that strive for heroic grandeur but also want to have modernist crackly and crispness. That's a terrible thing to attempt. And mixed with the film's obviously unacceptable desire to marry contemporary morality to a story that has absolutely nothing contemporary about it, we end up with a bunch of people who feel like kids in overly expensive costumes play-acting at Greek Warriors. Thrill to a watery Orlando Bloom as Paris and Diane Kruger breathily puffing out all her lines as Helen! Delight in Sean Bean getting a rare non-villainous, non-dead part as an unnecessarily solemn and signally un-clever Odysseus! Be baffled by Brendan Gleeson's curiously pathetic Menelaus! Gape in amazement at Brian Cox's chomping down on the set with his monumentally overripe, campy Agamemnon - actually, so that last one is pretty okay. Given the film's petulant insistence on making all this a grubby little political parable about imperialists going to war on false pretenses, and its absurd hatchet job of the mythological Agamemnon as a result, the choices Cox made are very nearly the best ones. It's not a legitimately good performance, like the one O'Toole is giving, but it's fun and feisty and lively, a description that applies to very little in this movie.

Pitt and Eric Bana, who plays Hector, the hero of Troy opposite the Greek hero Achilles, certainly are neither feisty nor lively; in the two central roles, the significantly unmatched actors seem hellbent on racing towards the bottom, to determine which can more openly telegraph how sad and lonely and pensive he is. Not a great fit for a movie based on Greek myth, not a great fit for a movie selling itself on the rollicking scope of its CGI battle scenes either. It's simultaneously too airless and serious with all its glowering about history and memory, and too ridiculous with its over-the-top everything visually. It is tacky crap, and tacky crap that frequently vanishes up its own ass.

And yet! It is merely, in that respect, hearkening back to the old '60s sword & sandal films, which are today defensible mostly only on the level of spirited kitsch. Those were expensive effects showcases too, and they suffered from most of the same flaws as Troy: stiff acting, impossible dialogue, elaborate sets that only ever look like elaborate sets, costumes that are far too clean. So hooray for the explosion of CGI in the 2000s: it made it possible to re-make the mistakes that blew up an industry two generations earlier. So much for remembering history.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2004
-Michael Moore's essay film Fahrenheit 9/11 exemplifies the bitterly divided political landscape, and taps it for a stunning amount of money
-Quentin Tarantino releases the second half of his ambitious tribute to the international history of exploitation cinema, Kill Bill
-The mostly forgotten Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow blazes new ground in computer-created sets for "live-action" films

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2004
-Sembene Ousmane's brilliant Moolaadé addresses the bleak issue of female genital mutilation with sparkling visual wit and rage
-Jean-Luc Godard has the closest thing he'll ever have to a late-period popular hit, Notre musique
-The child-driven domestic drama Nobody Knows makes a major director out of Koreeda Hirokazu

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1998: In which Hollywood's king of populist entertainment critques wartime jingoism while also pandering to it

Knowing that I'd eventually get to write about Saving Private Ryan - to grapple with my own wildly inconsistent feelings about it over the years, as well as to challenge all of you, my readers, to do the same - has been one of the things that I've been most excited about since the very beginning of this blog's Hollywood Century project. So here we are, and here we grapple, and I have 16 years of accumulated thoughts, praise, complaints, and misgivings to get through in the next couple thousand words. Apologies in advance if it gets a little messy.

The confusion I have long felt about the film is not least because there are two films we talk about when we talk about Saving Private Ryan: one is 21 minutes long, and it maybe the best-crafted & most powerful combat film ever produced. The other is much, much longer, and it is a largely trite, generic, and in some important ways philosophically dubious story of a squad in WWII trudging through France in June, 1944, while complaining in ways that perfectly map onto the pre-established clichés for each of the eight men in that squad. Actually, there's a third movie, too: it's the opening and closing bookends set in, presumably, 1998 itself, the year of the film's release, and it is among the clumsiest, most disastrously-conceived material in the entirety of Steven Spielberg's directorial corpus.

But let's stick with the actual meat of the movie first. As virtually everybody knows, I imagine, Saving Private Ryan opens (after that 1998 scene) at the onset of the D-Day invasion of the beaches of Normandy, follows along with one tiny cluster of American soldiers for quite a while, and then continues on as those soldiers are assigned a most peculiar mission three days after the Allied forces successfully land. To wit: they are to trek deep into the French countryside, where they must find one PFC James Ryan, whose three brothers have all died recently, and whom the Army brass has decided shall be saved from the hell of war, so that his mother doesn't have to suffer the agony of losing all her children in quick succession.

Admitting out front that the movie has other priorities on its mind, the first problem we run into is structural. The movie begins three times, and each new beginning seems to have virtually nothing to do with what we've already seen. The transition out of the opening scene makes absolutely no sense once you know where the film is going, implying that the old man (Harrison Young) we're watching in the American war cemetery at Normandy is recalling his experience on that beach, staring a thousand-yard stare as the soundtrack begins to filter in the pre-invasion sounds of waves, boats, and men shuffling. I think there's really no conceivable way to read the editing and sound, even the way the man's face is held in close-up, without making that assumption; but we'll find out at the end that he was miles and miles inland during the invasion. Strike one.

Then comes the invasion itself, a three-act mini-movie unto itself, that has no connection to the ultimate attempt to find Private Ryan. We're introduced to most of our main characters, but we don't know that we're being introduced to them: the sequence ties itself to Captain Jim Miller, who we know is important because he's played by Tom Hanks, but we don't know who he is by name yet, and we don't have any notion of who the people are around him. This isn't an introduction, but a totally unrelated narrative chunk that happens to concern the same characters. It's the backstory to the actual plot of Saving Private Ryan only to the same degree that watching Don Corleone having eggs and coffee while reading the morning paper would have been a useful opening scene to The Godfather.

Now, we are not dumb, and so we know that Spielberg and screenwriter Robert Rodat had other things on their mind in including the D-Day invasion than telling a clear, cohesive story. Saving Private Ryan is, explicitly, a film paying tribute to the men who fought and died in World War II, and that is far more important to it than telling a story or fleshing out characters. And in that regard, the Omaha Beach scene is far more important and comprehensible, since its function is to show the chaos and agony of war, so that we'll have a better sense for the rest of the movie of what kind of terrible suffering these men go through. Its value, that is to say, is entirely thematic - and I'll return to that, but now let's turn to the battle scene itself.

It is a work of genius, of course. I can't imagine how anyone but the most morbid Spielberg hater could deny that. What is remarkable to me above all things is how the invasion sequence in this film is absolutely and in every way the work of a populist filmmaker: the craftsmanship and ability to lead the audience to an emotional place he has preselected (the commonest knock against Spielberg, but also to my mind the least-convincing: all movies are emotionally manipulative, he's just unusually direct in showing he he does it) that he'd honed over years of making some of the biggest crowd-pleasers in cinema history turns out to work just as well, and in exactly the same ways, when he's trying to flatten us into terrified submission. Saving Private Ryan's combat scenes are fucking brilliant filmmaking, innovative and groundbreaking in ways that so quickly became standard procedure for war movies, and especially WWII movies, that it's difficult to quite see what makes it special. But oh, how special it is: just the way that Janusz Kamiński shot it (to my mind, this is the film that cemented him as an essential part of the Spielberg team) would be worth a paper all by itself. The short version is that he relies on excessive grain and desaturation to create a bleak, almost nauseating feeling, which is then built on by his celebrated use of a decreased shutter angle, giving the images a sharp, metallic precision and render the movements with staccato bursts that keep feeling like they're going to launch into fast-motion. And on top of that, we also find extensive use of erratic hand-held camera work, Spielberg's open attempt to copy documentary style, which extends to allowing dirt and stage blood to slop all over the lens.

All that hyper-realistic cinematography creates an immersive reality more than virtually any other combat scene I can name, and that's even without mentioning the film's amazing sound mix - an astonishingly powerful experience in theaters, one that I remember 16 years later more clearly than things I saw last week. Every single bullet feels like it was placed specifically to suggest physical space and the sheer scale of the D-Day invasion, echoing on all sides, now horribly close and now terribly far. For that is the other thing that sets this scene above so many other great combat sequences: the feeling of littleness it creates. We follow a tiny number of people through a confusingly-defined space, and we never get a sense of what's going on all throughout the rest of the beach except in the flashes that Miller is able to spot out of the corner of his eye. But that roaring sound mix tells all: it describes with all its layers a battleground stretching out into infinity, bodies dying invisibly - and sometimes quite visibly, right before our eyes, in blunt scenes of carnage - in which the one man we're following barely registers as an individual.

There are no moments of Spielbergian sentiment, and yet the whole thing is finely tuned and orchestrated using his very particular skills: an awareness of how to use brief, iconic gestures to thrust us into a state of high emotion. Panic, in this case, something not found in such protracted form anywhere else in the director's career. The exact things that make this work are what make it the work of a mainstream entertainer: things are communicated simply, directly, and without a trace of subtlety, and our gaze is directed exactly where the filmmakers want it to be directed, so that we can be walloped by whatever they're going to show us next.

It's tremendously powerful and crushing, and then it ends, and Saving Private Ryan actually, finally starts. You can tell exactly where it happens, because the John Williams score that has been silent for 21 minutes asserts itself, and in the blink of an eye this harsh, sober experience turns gloppy and dumb. For this particular Williams score is offensively sentimental and pushy and omnipresent beyond even the caricature of his work; I wouldn't hesitate a moment to call it the worst score he composed for any Spielberg film. At any rate, it's the only one of his scores for the director that actively makes the film worse, cutting into Kamiński's sober, bleached-out images and the uncharacteristic hardness of Spielberg's camera and direction to his actors with weepy, patriotic horns and militaristic elegy.

That being said, the A-plot of Saving Private Ryan is so beset by trouble spots that singling out the music is a bit unfair. To begin with, Miller's squad reveals itself to be populated exclusively by clichés who are precisely described the first time we see them, and never break out of our immediate preconception as to what they're going to do. Besides our taciturn captain, we have the Hothead (Edward Burns), the Tough GI (Tom Sizemore) the Bible-Thumping Southerner (Barry Pepper), the Sarcastic Jew (Adam Goldberg), the Pleasant Medic (Giovanni Ribisi), the Warmhearted Rough Italian (Vin Diesel), and most importantly of all, the Untrained Newbie and Audience/Director Surrogate (Jeremy Davies), the one with a sturdy moral sense but also no survival instinct at all. I suspect, if pressed, Spielberg and Rodat would defend their pack of unimaginative stereotypes as a tribute to the WWII films of yore, all the way back to the '40s when those stereotypes started to congeal. Except that Saving Private Ryan absolutely, transparently wants to be more complex than that: to present battle as a horrible experience, not an ennobling one, and to present the trauma of warfare as serving more to flatten soldiers' humanity rather than to make them Manly American Men. Relying on musty old stock characters gets in the way of that.

And anyway, the direction of the plot over the next two hours is so all-over-the-map that no consistent theme emerges anyway; the only clear message that has emerged by the end is the conviction that, well, Our Boys sure did see some terrible things over there. Critically, the film never quite makes up its mind whether all the killing and seeing the enemy as a faceless Other is ultimately soul-damaging or not; the arc of Davies's character famously muddies all of this, since it's structured largely to show how he comes to realise that killing prisoners is okay - and yet, the way that Spielberg and Kamiński film his ultimate act of killing, with the camera trained on Davies's face and never showing the German body fall, doesn't permit the viewer a sense of celebration and suggests that we're watching him fall into the dark side. But that kind of moral ambiguity fits not at all with the many other scenes.

Running down everything that works beautifully (a scene where a little girl assaults her dad for putting her in harm's way in the act of trying to save her; Hanks's cold-blooded recitation of the big Norman Rockwell speech about his homelife) and everything that doesn't (the bafflingly over-written scene with General Marshall, played by Harve Presnell, concocting the plot to save Private Ryan; pretty much every single beat focused on Pepper's sniper, who prays for guidance from God before killing his enemies, a potentially rich irony that Spielberg is palpably frightened to grapple with) would take too long, so suffice it to say that the film suffers from aimlessness and bloat, perked up frequently by individually piercing moments of character truth. And the film always, always looks perfect, capturing both painterly beauty and a sense of devastated coldness simultaneously. To be honest, winning the Best Director Oscar but losing Best Picture to Shakespeare in Love seems almost exactly right to me: Saving Private Ryan succeeds at the creation of stable tone and texture, but is messy and wandering as a drama (of course, exactly exactly right would have been The Thin Red Line making a clean sweep of everything but Kamiński's win, but it does nobody any good to pretend that was ever an option).

The film does eventually find focus and purpose again - and drops the damn Williams music - in another long combat scene, this time after the squad has found Private Ryan (Matt Damon - and Jesus, but the number of future famous people in this movie is impressive; Bryan Cranston and Nathan Fillion also pop up). It's a terrific piece of filmmaking, if not quite as radical in its technique. But unlike Omaha Beach, this climax isn't quite so much about the punishing brutality of war; it's more of a conventional action movie, rousing and saddening in equal measure. François Truffaut legendarily observed that no war film can truly argue against war, since they always make combat look exciting; this is not true at all of the grotesque opening sequence, but it is at least partially true of the finale. And that's without dragging in the cloying final scene, which looks at all the ambiguity threaded throughout even the weaker moments of the main feature, and says "well, fuck that", with a stirring coda in which it is clarified that to die in combat serving one's country is a Glorious Sacrifice, and those who fought but did not die are always going to be haunted by the conviction that they're not as morally good as the fallen. It's jingoistic pap, made worse by the film's only truly uninteresting cinematography, and Williams slobbering aural war memorial.

Saving Private Ryan achieved something that, even after a decade and a half, I still can't quite believe: this very long, depressing, unsparingly violent movie was the highest-grossing film of 1998 (domestically - worldwide, it was easily bested by Michael Bay's shrill Armageddon, which makes much more sense even though it's much sadder). It was, in fact, the last Steven Spielberg film to top the year's box office, and the last R-rated film as well. Much as he had done when getting in right at the first stages of a major new revival in dinosaur fandom with Jurassic Park, the director somehow managed to predict the Zeitgeist in some unfathomable way: 1998 also saw the release of Tom Brokaw's book The Greatest Generation, and between the two projects, they triggered a wave of nostalgia for and interest in the culture surrounding World War II that I honestly have never figured out.

Whatever the case, something about this unremittingly bleak film, whose sops towards uplift and finding something purposeful in war feel messily splashed onto its overriding sense of desolation, struck an enormous chord with audiences. I can't argue that's not deserved, even though it's weird: Spielberg-the-sentimentalist transforming into Spielberg-the-unsmiling-chronicler leaves us with quite a sturdy array of well-built, emotionally transfixing moments. Much of it is foggy, and a small amount of it is actively objectionable, but so much of Saving Private Ryan works so well, and so undeniably, that even if I think it can only be regarded as one of Spielberg's most difficult "problem" films, it's absolutely the work of a supremely talented film director with an irreproachable, top-notch crew.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1998
-Terry Gilliam's final film that gets made without the world burning down around it, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, is released
-Peter Weir and Andrew Niccol predict, then indict reality TV with The Truman Show
-Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner just wave their dicks right out there for everyone to see, pitting DreamWorks Animation's Antz and Pixar's A Bug's Life against each other

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1998
-Still the best movie ever built on video game narrative logic, Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run bows in Germany
-Nakata Hideo's Ringu inaugurates the modern era of J-horror
-Show Me Love - known more bluntly as Fucking Åmål in its native Sweden - introduces the world to the social realism of Lukas Moodysson

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