THE RULES OF THE GAMINE

A second review requested by Brian Malbon, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Concision is nice and all, but it's hard not to be jealous that in 2001, those of us in the English-speaking world got a movie with the blunt, sensible title Amélie, while in France, where the film was born out of the fertile mind of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, they had the enthusiastic The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain. Which is absolutely more in line with the movie as it exists out in the wild.

The movie marked Jeunet's return to France after his abortive one-movie layover in Hollywood, where he caused the frantic, kaleidoscopic Alien: Resurrection to happen into the world. That experience, of course,didn't go well for anybody (least of all the audience), but it seems to have been of some use to Jeunet, for his next feature is a pretty perfect hybrid of the delirious fantasies he directed with Marc Caro in the 1990s, Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, and the glossy high-tech sensibility of a Hollywood production. Amélie is impossible to have without CGI, which meant something a lot different in 2001 than it means now.

It's also true that, compared to Delicatessen (a vicious dark comedy) and The City of Lost Children (a demented Surrealist nightmare), Amélie is vastly more audience-friendly, though I cannot say whether this is because Jeunet was infected by the American film industry, or simply because everything dark and warped in the firs two movies was the responsibility of Caro. At any rate, it is effervescent and cheery; maddeningly, toxically cheery, if you're not on its wavelength, and I've always been surprised by the number of people I've met who were absolutely not on that wavelength.Certainly, I can see where the film would become thoroughly enervating if you don't find a way into its style: everything about the design, the dialogue, the acting, and especially the cinematography (by my beloved Bruno Delbonnel; this is the movie that put him on the map) and score (by Yann Tiersen) is utterly artificial and unrelenting. In fact, I should underline that again: especially especially the score. Tiersen's music, which I find utterly beguiling, is jolly, robust, and feels like it belongs under a circus tent in some overheated Epcot Center version of France as foreigners imagine it. It hits the ground running before even the puckish, detached narration delivered plummily by André Dussolier has found its footing, and it tells us all we ever need to know about Amélie: you're about to watch a carnival in the guise of a romantic comedy about a young Parisian woman doing good deeds.

"Carnivalesque" is a lazy word to describe Jeunet's aesthetic, but it has the benefit of being exactly correct. The thing unifying all of his films made without Caro is that they're populated by elaborately fanciful and quirky characters who nevertheless feel like they could somehow manage to exist in the real world (something that's certainly not true of the fanciful cast of City of Lost Children), they move through brightly colored spaces at a high energy, and they and the movie containing them always feels profoundly giddy and delighted at the raw possibilities of moviedom. They are garish celebrations of vitality. Now, in a science-fiction/horror movie about biological nightmares, or a romantic drama about World War I, that's not the most natural fit in the world, which is why neither Alien: Resurrection nor A Very Long Engagement can necessarily be defended as unambiguously great cinema (though I've always very much liked the latter film and have come around a great deal on the former). The reason Amélie is such a great triumph - the best film of Jeunet's career, solo or as part of a team, and one of the most deeply pleasurable French films of the 2000s - is that it's the perfect marriage of aesthetic to narrative content. For the script itself is exactly the same kind of celebration of life in all its kooky back alleys that the director's style turns itself towards regardless of what story is being told.

The narrative is so straightforward that it's hard to imagine it can get all the way to two hours, let alone two hours that never feel even a bit laggy: Amélie Poulain (Audrey Tautou) is a waitress at a café in Montmarte, and on the day of Princess Diana's death in August, 1997, she finds a small chunk of tile on her wall that can be pulled out, revealing a cubbyhole with a tin of various scraps of paper and toys that a boy in the 1950s might have considered his most important treasures. She tracks down the owner of this box, and he's so moved by this injection of his past life, he immediately sets to reconnecting with his estranged daughter. This gives Amélie such a rush that she immediately sets herself to the task of doing good for as many people as she can find, be they strangers, friends, or family. And one particular recipient of her care, Nino Quincampoix (Mathieu Kassovitz), catches her fancy as more than just a charity case. But on top of all her very lovely characteristics, Amélie is cripplingly shy, and it's easier for her to construct an elaborate game to flirt with Nino than to come anywhere close to letting him know who she is.

There's a lot to say about Amélie, but what trumps everything is that this is a really fucking nice motion picture. It's trite to say, but most movies that can be described as "great" - those made with high levels of craftsmanship and artistry, anxious to demand a lot from the audience, and polished at every level of their production - are usually about grave topics. There really aren't all that many movies made at Amélie's level of achievement whose subject matter and tone both support the idea that the world and the people in it are basically good, and it's possible for a driven, dedicated individual to make everybody's lives better, including her own. It's shocking how little actual conflict exists in the movie: two male characters are presented as abrasive and unpleasant, but one is generally redeemed over the course of the movie, and neither of them represent any kind of block to Amélie herself. The only tension that actually exists in the film's two hours are whether or not this endlessly upbeat character will be able to overcome her retiring personality to do something actively nice for herself. Which is a conflict, to be sure, but so internalised and abstract as to be almost totally non-cinematic.

So instead of being driven by story, Amélie is driven by its light tone, and its abiding love of its characters, whom it happily spends long, lingering moments with. It largely abates in the film's second half, but a very large amount of the running time is given over to parenthetical moments and asides dedicated to fleshing out the characters, including Amélie herself - even including her mother (Lorella Cravotta), who dies in a freak accident before the movie has even really gotten around to starting. In one respect, this is a straightforward evolution from City of Lost Children, which sketches out its profoundly bizarre cast at the level of attitude and imagery; Amélie backs off slightly from that film's storybook grotesquerie, but uses much the same technique to quickly establish characters while digging much deeper into their hearts and minds.

Meanwhile, it's style is bulbous and bright, with lots of wide-angle lenses used to make the main character literally wide-eyed. Jeunet and editor Hervé Schneid trot out a great many fun tricks for colliding and overlapping shots to suggest the characters' thoughts spilling out into the world; Delbonnel's heavily processed cinematography (over-reachingly declared the best of the decade by American Cinematographer in 2010; I'm not even certain that I'd call it Delbonnel's own best work in that span of time, but it's undeniably lovely and came with a high degree of difficulty) bathes the whole movie in a warm coating of yellows and occasional greens that give it an unabashedly nostalgic glow - the film exactly sets itself to the late summer of 1997, but it has the faraway visual texture of something set at least before World War II - and ramp up the friendly, happy energy. It's sunshiney, that's what it is, with a great many bright exteriors shot in a cartoony register to make them seem even lighter.

The result is a movie that's extraordinarily likable and overwhelmingly generous. It's not blatantly unrealistic - suffering and exploitation exist in the world. But it's one of the great cinematic depictions of optimism that we are capable of beating those things down. And it's a remarkable, tender, and entirely honest (despite all the cartoon borders) portrayal of crippling introversion being gently, steadily massaged into something more productive and rewarding. This is one of the most uplifting movies of the 21st Century in every way, and certainly one of the most artistically complex and intelligent movies on such apparently simplistic, cheery themes. It's a happy, guileless masterpiece, and there simply aren't enough of those to go around.

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THE CURIOUS LITTLE MONKEY

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

You have to hold it just right, but Curious George is sort of the exact moment that traditional animation died in the American studio system. There have been only four theatrically-released studio features animated in a traditional aesthetic style since Universal dropped the movie indifferently into the world in February, 2006, and every one of them comes with an asterisk: 2009's The Princess and the Frog and 2011's Winnie the Pooh were both essentially boutique products made by Disney, a company that openly tries to dictate rather than follow market realities;The Simpsons Movie in 2007 was, well, The Simpsons Movie, and beholden to an entirely unique audience; 2015's The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, though primarily traditional animation, was heavily marketed to seem like a mostly CGI/live-action production. None of these four films entered the marketplace in anything like the same way Curious George did, in the wholly guileless belief that there was still an audience for traditional animation, albeit an audience of the extremely young and their parents. For its optimism, the film managed to not humiliate itself at the box office, and not a whole lot more.

Now, the danger in putting a movie like this in front of a classic American animation junkie like me is that Curious George much too easily invites "they used to it so much better! why do we live in such ghastly & depraved times! &c." rhetoric that does nobody any good. But there's little point in pretending that it's not exactly what it is: a movie that exists completely at odds to everything in the mainstream of family entertainment as it was practiced in the mid-'00s, which is much the same as it's practiced now, only with slightly less pop culture riffing. A mere two years after Shrek 2 landed on the animation marketplace like a bomb, this wasn't merely a throwback, it was something like an act of war, if a movie with such a profoundly gentle attitude can reasonably described as "warlike". The steady, pleasant story by Ken Kaufman and Mike Werb, adapting the iconic children's books by husband-and-wife illustrator-authors H.A. and Margret Rey nods its head to the greater world of animation storytelling as it existed at that point in time only in that it involves a kind of stupidly convoluted backstory to drive the action, involving concepts that feel a bit more elevated than the film's apparent target audience is likely to cotton to (will the old natural history museum turn into a parking garage, or can the heroes come up with a new exhibit to draw in big crowds in time?). But it has an almost Miyazakian calmness in keeping its stakes down to a nice slow boil, even going so far as to turn its antagonist into a sad, pitiable figure before the halfway mark.

It's an origin story, in which museum employee Ted (Will Ferrell) enthusiastically pitches himself into the mission of finding the lost shrine of Zagawa, home to an enormous ruby statue of an ape, in order to keep the Bloomsberry Museum solvent. For otherwise, the kind science nut Mr. Bloomsberry (Dick Van Dyke, in the first and far sweeter of his 2006 museum-related roles - Night at the Museum hulks in the future like a nascent canker sore) will be helpless to prevent his resentful son (David Cross, whose character has been designed to look unnervingly like him) from tearing the place down. Bloomsberry fils is able to sabotage Ted's trip enough that the explorer only finds a three-inch statue that guides the way to the actual shrine, but he also stumbles across a deeply inquisitive monkey (vocalised by the inimitable Frank Welker), who sneaks along back to the boat behind this strange lanky man all in yellow (Ted was tricked into buying surplus yellow khaki hiking clothes, to bring him in line as the Man with the Yellow Hat, the nameless character's designation in the books). Ted is at first anguished by how badly the monkey, eventually named George by the enthusiastic children under the care of the kind schoolteacher Maggie (Drew Barrymore), messes up his life, but the instant that he finally packs the simian off with animal control, he realises how much more enjoyable things were with that tiny bit of chaos. As one will. Also, the museum is razed and Mr. Bloomsberry is sent to a nursing home, babbling and senescent. Of course not! Unpredictable plotting is so low on Curious George's list of priorities that there's not even a number for it.

It takes a lot to sand the edges off of profoundly harmless source material, but Curious George does manage to be even less threatening than the books ever were; George has been changed from a playfully naughty little scamp to en embodiment of pure, untroubled innocence, so guileless that his rule-breaking only ever manages to charm his victims. Ted has dropped from being a stable adult presence to just a big kid, hideously shy around an very cute, obviously interested girl, and easily bruised by setbacks. It is a very soft movie, Curious George is, which turns out to be greatly appealing in the execution; there is not a trace of mania even when it takes its Pixarian turn into a chase, of sorts, around a city. The jokes are a bit dry and ironic, but never very difficult, and never too funny, in the sense that it expects a boisterous reaction. Director Matthew O'Callaghan is certain looking to amuse his audience, but not to whip us up; Curious George is as soothing as a fleece blanket and cup of tea on a rainy day.

I say that entirely from an adult's perspective: for all I know, actual children out in the world would find this maddeningly slow and low-impact, and that's part of why it has almost completely disappeared from any kind of cultural dialogue in less than a decade - hell, less than a couple of years. But it can be nice to watching something that pursues quiet and simplicity as a distinctive choice and not just a fallback from laziness - this is an immensely well-crafted movie, especially as a piece of animation, including use of color and and light that absolutely shame Disney's traditional animation death rattle from the handful of years preceding. Not, I hasten to point out, the actual character animation; the humans in the film are so simple that they start to lose definition. Nor in the effects, which are satisfactory without being terribly far-reaching or complicated (there are aerial shots of the crowded city that look several years behind the technological curve). But it's a beautiful movie in pastel and primary tones, with everything feeling covered by an almost indecipherable layer of fuzz. This, for example, is the ending position of the film's opening shot, and our first good look at the protagonist:

As opening mission statements go, that's a pretty clear one: you are about to embark on a movie that goes just a lightly diffuse as it hits your eyes, where nothing is indistinct, but even less so is anything particularly sharp. Also, the main character is boundlessly happy, like, always.

The results aren't perfect; owing mainly to a George-less first act (after an opening scene that functions as a prologue) that takes too much time being goofy and shrill about setting up the plot and human characters, all of whom are some kind of stereotype, but only sometimes obvious or reductive ones. The fate of a museum is a fine plot hook, but it didn't need to be set up in such detail, or with so much concern over Ted's whole deal. And the voices don't, in general, fit the faces - Ferrell disappears into his part, but Van Dyke, Barrymore, and Eugene Levy all significantly do not, and the presence of their characters tends to upset the movie's low key energy.

And really, the storytelling throughout is kind of strained: the movie constantly pulls itself between the states of "this is sweet and gentle and just about being in the moment" and "look at the gimcracks and silliness!", and the more it forgets about that damn parking garage, and the more it just watches Ted and George interacting, the more rewarding it is. So overall it's a touch lumpy, unsure of how patient it can honestly expect its audience to be; but it absolutely never panders, and it's lovely to look at for literally every frame of its running time, even with the "eh" level of the CG elements. I'm not sure if it deserves to be the childhood classic that it surely never shall become, but it's nice to have something this sincere and comforting out in the world, to be enjoyed by whatever small and self-selecting audience has the good fortune to stumble across it.

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THE OLD BALLGAME

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

It's a bit tricky to decide exactly what to do with The Natural, a 1984 film that's good in almost every possible way, including some ways that a movie of its genre - the Inspirational Period Sports Drama - has absolutely no reason to be good. But the small handful of things that aren't so good are absolutely critical, and these begin with the insoluble paradox of its central piece of casting: Robert Redford makes perfect sense for the requirements of the film's main character as a personality and as the object upon which every other character pours out their observations on masculinity, American life, and baseball, in reverse order; he makes no wrong choices at any point along the way, and in several key places he makes exactly the right choice, even when it's hardly the most obvious or in-tune with his tics as an actor. And despite this, he's Just Not Right.

It's easy to blame his age, and honestly, that's a good enough explanation to the problem that it doesn't even require more digging: everything happening within the story hinges upon the age of Redford's character, in his mid 30s, and while all of us should be so blessed as to look like 47-year-old Robert Redford when we are 47 ourselves, there's little denying that his skin was already taking on the sun-worn cragginess that makes it difficult to think of him as even a year or two younger. I suspect there's a deeper reason for it, too: The Natural is a story about dogged pursuit of one's dreams even when they make absolutely no sense and everyone around is seemingly involved in some unspoken Kakfaesque agreement to work with all urgency against the fulfillment of those dreams, but Redford has such a charming presence, ready to fall into such warm and inveigling line deliveries at the drop of a hat - he seems, briefly, so smart, collected, and on top of everything that it's never very easy to imagine him having a hard time getting things in life. There was a little stretch there in the '70s when he was working with directors and scripts that facilitated that - Three Days of the Condor most effectively - but in general, Redford characters never appear to be working for it. A film like The Candidate trades on that; a film like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid goes with it. The Natural runs right up against it.

That is, however, an unnecessarily pissy foot to start off with regarding a film that I just described as "good in almost every possible way". Adapted - somewhat carelessly, it is generally alleged - from Bernard Malamud's 1952 baseball-as-Arthurian-quest novel by Robert Towne and Phil Dusenberry, The Natural takes place primarily in two narrative chunks, one in the early '20s and one in the late '30s, that find wannabee baseball player Roy Hobbs (Redford), as a young man - and all other misgivings aside, it was a titanic miscalculation to have Redford play the 19-year-old Hobbs as well as the 35-year-old version - getting shot by a deranged baseball groupie-slash-serial killer (Barbara Hershey), and I will confess that at this point, The Natural very nearly lost me. But it muscles on through to find the much older Hobbs, still nursing his talent in silence, being signed by the desperate New York Knights, and proving himself an unprecedented phenom for an old guy, with a virtually supernatural ability to hit the ball with his homemade bat, Wonderboy, carved from the wood of a tree from his childhood farm. This kind of success attracts all the wrong kinds of attention, with the team's corrupt owner (Robert Prosky) and a charismatic gambler (Darren McGavin) colluding to throw a temptress, Memo Paris (Kim Basinger) in Hobb's path and convince him through her to start throwing games. And he falters, on and off, when not being bolstered by his newly returned childhood sweetheart Iris (Glenn Close), but this being the kind of film it is, there's no real surprise that he's more in the off-faltering mode when the Big Game comes and it becomes not merely question of talent but of moral character whether he'll drag the Knights into the World Series.

It's all very corny and much of it's almost alarmingly overbaked: a scheming honeypot named Memo Paris belongs in the steamy back alleys of film noir, not a sun-dappled paean to nostalgia, fair play, and the Great American pastime. Yet it works - it works almost without a single exception, in fact, and the only problems I can really level against it are a somewhat clumsy sense of chronology in the first act (exacerbated in the director's cut), and a couple of weak performances here and there (Redford's miscasting, Basinger's slack-jawed emptiness, Close's closed-off quietness in a somewhat snoozy performance of an absolutely narcoleptic character, for which she somehow managed her third Oscar nomination in as many years).

Admittedly, "problems" are in the eye of the beholder, and some of the things I'd list among the film's biggest strengths could easily be turned around and cited as overwhelming weaknesses: it all depends on how much you mind being elbowed by Randy Newman's absolutely shameless score, with its noble and sad Trumpets of Americana; it's the kind of relentless soul-stirring that tends to get people incredibly angry at the overt attempt to manipulate the viewer's emotions, though what kind of innocent fool wanders into a sports drama and plans to not have their emotions manipulated three ways to Sunday, I can't suppose. Anyway, I'd rather have it happen because Newman is good at his job than because the screenwriters are bad at theirs. Also falling into the "good unless you think it's bad" camp: Caleb Deschanel's equally shameless cinematography, rendering every available surface in a layer of dusty haze with each molecule of air lovingly wrapped in soft sunlight. It's brazenly pretty and hushed, and it's making a play for faded historicity that, by 1984, certainly didn't qualify as strikingly original. But Deschanel is as good at this kind of thing as anybody ever has been - it's an extension of and improvement on what he was doing in the already impressively handsome The Right Stuff (his film immediately preceding this one), investing hard in the Rockwellian picturesque qualities that the story's nostalgic elements demand and providing the right visual space for its feints towards mythological resonance to feel plausible and organic and not just like literary conceits.

The film's biggest strength, though, and maybe its unlikeliest, is that it feels shockingly free of urgency. Barry Levinson, directing only his second career feature (and his best till at least his seventh, Avalon, by my reckoning), makes none of the ordinary decisions in how to pace his film's race to the pennant; if anything, The Natural feels like it stretches out and slows down the closer it gets to the climax, indulging itself in lingering with the characters and watching them navigate the precise re-creation of 1930s New York, and at no point until the game itself acting like this is some kind of world-altering moment of grave importance. It's a languid, ambling film, one that slows almost to a complete stop in the scenes when Close arrives and it devotes itself entirely to becoming a character drama. And this has the bizarre, unpredictable, but wholly tangible effect of making it feel fuller and realer: by backing off on the melodrama that usually characterises underdog sports movies, and just hanging out in the characters' space, Levinson succeeded in making one of the only underdog sports melodramas that absolutely convinces us that it's worth taking seriously at all. For it's not just about grinding through plot points that we're well aware are going to play out precisely the way they play out; it's about seeing the reverberations of those plot points in more detail than most films that are just rushing to get uplift junkies their fix could ever dare to try for. It's still hemmed in by its genre, and I say that as a person who has very, very little use for that genre, by custom. But a more thoughtfully presented and literate movie dedicated to the principal that baseball is all things holy and noble is extremely hard to imagine.

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I'M WITH THE BAND

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: IN A MINER KEY

Pride is, in the first place, an irresistibly nice movie. There's a question to be asked whether that is, in and of itself, its big problem. For it is also a movie set against an extremely non-nice pair of events: the miners' strike of 1984-'85 in Great Britain, and the expanding AIDS crisis. And while the film touches on both of these topics - the miners' strike is the engine driving the plot, after all - it does so awfully gingerly, as though it's terrified to ruin the audience's good time by reminding us of the stakes of its own story. A story this steeped in political activism that's so skittish about the actual stuff of politics can't help but be frustrating; but genial British comedies have been trivialising the causes and consequences of the strike for years now. So if nothing else, Pride is in good company.

More importantly, the film's a genuinely effective crowd-pleaser of a sort that the UK film industry used to crank out with great regularity back in the '90s and early '00s, and isn't really any more. And the crowd it's pleasing isn't one that wants a nuanced discussion of class issues under Thatcher, or would know what to do with one if it had been provided in this form. So judging the film according to its own goals, it's a pretty clear-cut success across the board: full of well-etched characters who feel like "types" but are also fully-realised as people with individual personalities and identities, able to deftly mix light comedy, bawdy jokes, and sobriety without giving the viewer tonal whiplash. And even in its rather cagey appropriation of only the bits of politics and history it feels comfortable engaging with, it does the admirable and necessary work of calling attention to a rather special and unique political alliance.

That alliance being between Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, the brainchild of Mark Ashton (Ben Schnetzer), gay activist and Communist (the latter fact quietly removed from the movie), and the miners' union in Onllwyn, Wales. The film simplifies the history a bit in the interest of keeping things focused more on the characters involved, which is quite a range of humanity played by one of the best casts assembled in 2014. Among the LGBT activists, we find shy, closted 20-year-old virgin Joe (George McKay) - the one entirely fictional character in the cast - middle-aged couple Jonathan (Dominic West) and Gethin (Andrew Scott), and punk Steph (Faye Marsay); among the miners and the townsfolk, the ebullient Hefina (Imelda Staunton), enthusiastic Siân (Jessica Gunning), taciturn wiseman Cliff (Bill Nighy), and the delightfully awkward Dai, who ends up the bumbling but wholly well-meaning ambassador between LGSM and the miners, and is played to quiet, earnest perfection by Paddy Considine, who I'd just barely be willing to give best in show honors to, slightly edging out Schnetzer. But everybody's great, and I've really just cherry-picked some new and established names; in point of fact, Pride includes a solid two-dozen characters of greater or lesser importance who linger in the memory, fleshing out the village with people who make lasting impression with just a few minutes to sketch in a backstory and feelings about this unprecedented turn of events, and giving all of the activists individual histories within the general overlap that unites them all, that sneak out as we observe them rather than being baldly stated.

Writer Stephen Beresford and director Matthew Warchus collide their two groups with unexpected gentleness; other than a token bigot family, and some late-coming complications, there's very little "rural blue-collar men mistrust The Gays" drama that would seem to be a natural fit for a film like this, and cheers to that. It only deprives the film of easy jokes, and forces it instead to explore more delicate dynamics of how people behave in new situations, what choices they make as to how to present themselves, and the judgments they make (or don't) about other people's merits. This is sweetened by a predominately jokey, broad tone in the beginning, mostly carried by the ladies of the village and their blowsy fascination with this new breed of man that isn't sullen, grunting, and coated in coal dust; but for all that the selling point of Pride is it genial facility with quips, what sticks about it is the basic decency of all the people within it, and how happily it invites us to enjoy watching their decency unfold.

That's not all there is to it, I suppose. It's all that it really needs; it's more than a lot of the stand-issue working class Britcom, with its population of cartoon eccentrics, is able to claim. It's certainly what's most satisfying about the film; though I am sure that there's an audience, and not a small one, that finds its depiction of the mid-'80s evolution of gay political engagement in Britain to be bracing and smart rather than needlessly restrained (I doubt that there's an audience that could be entirely happy with the tossed-off treatment of the mining strike, but it's a big world). At any rate, the idea that basically good people can team up with other basically good people to make the world a basically better place is Pride's animating ethos, and it's given a lot of warm life by this treatment.

It's hardly a challenging or adventurous piece of filmmaking. The bright cinematography, by Tat Radcliffe, nimbly captures the colors and feeling of the film's re-creation of the 1980s (Charlotte Walter's costumes are splendid in this regard), and there are some terrific wide shots that depict Onllwyn with a grounded sense that keeps the film steady and true, but it's mostly a simple, conservative aesthetic. There are moments where Christopher Nightingale's score tries a bit too hard to tell us exactly what to feel, and they tend to come at the worst possible moments, but that's probably the film's biggest misstep (outside of a corny, hacky scene where the gays teach the straights how to Dance!!!!!). And for every mildly bad moment, there's a great moment to offset it: the coming to terms between a gay man and his long-estranged mother, done almost wordlessly; the nuances of staging and performance that let us know that one character learns he has AIDS without needing to stop the drama cold to clarify it; the giddy joy a bunch of old ladies feel upon finding gay porn.

The film could go deeper into its subject; the film could be more honest about the factual events it chooses to depict. These are givens, with mainstream film treatments of history. But within its limits, it's tremendously perceptive and warm and good-humored, and with a mix of genre and topic that seem tailor-maded for shtick, that's a pretty terrific achievement.

8/10

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WILD WOMAN

To begin with, Wild is a great deal better than 2007’s Into the Wild, its most direct antecedent in the “people finding themselves by dropping out and trekking through nature, meeting several people along the way who give symbolic life lessons, and ‘Wild’ is in the title” genre. And really, that’s all I needed to declare it a success, so the rest is gravy. Which is just as well, since for every single thing Wild gets right - and that is not an unimpressive list - it gets something else wrong.

Based on the life and memoirs of Cheryl Strayed, played by Reese Witherspoon in the movie (it was the first project made by her new production company), Wild tells the story of the three months in that woman’s life during which she hiked the Pacific Crest Trail from the southern to the northern border of the United States. This trip, at least as it’s described in Nick Hornby’s screenplay, was a self-conscious attempt to reboot a life that had gone tremendously wrong since the death of her mother (Laura Dern, in flashbacks that amount to more of an extended cameo than a proper “supporting” role): heroin, sex with every random man who asked, a failed marriage, grinding poverty. And to the surprise of nobody watching - they made the movie, after all, and it’s not being marketed as a severe piece of icy art cinema that involves death and hopelessness - that’s exactly what proved to happen, though only through a great deal of trial and error and being generally miserable for long stretches of the hike.

That, more than anything, is what puts Wild head and shoulders above Into the Wild: it is much freer in admitting that Cheryl entered her grand quest blindly and a bit stupidly, and the task of discovering what her priorities and emotional needs were was an extension of the more immediate task of figuring out how to survive the experience she’s committed herself to. Which even manages to make the film more inspirational than it would have been without the cold splash of reality, since it does such a fine job in the first third of making it really clear just how fucking hard hiking the entire length of the PCT could be, and how much untapped self-reliance Cheryl need to find in order to cope with it.

The other great strength of the film is Witherspoon, giving a fearlessly physical performance, pretty easily the best work of her career. The process-oriented nature of Hornby’s script robs the character of some nuance and leaves the film a bit thinner of a psychological portrait than it apparently fancies itself, but within the limits thus established by the writing, Witherspoon is very nearly perfect: channeling Cheryl’s rage at setbacks and her small pride in triumphs with unforced clarity; she captures the wearying monotony of walking and walking and walking with a beleaguered heaviness that does all the work of suggesting the passage of time that the film, obliged with keeping itself under two hours, doesn’t have the luxury to depict. And when the script moves away from depicting the act of hiking, Witherspoon does lovely work coming to life in the more intimate, character-focused moments, giving exactly the right energy to Hornby’s sardonic humor and quiet desperation.

So okay, that’s the good part. The bad part is possibly also due to Hornby, for the film’s structure is a bit dire; it’s absolutely due to Jean-Marc Vallée, directing with as clumsy a hand as this scenario can manage to survive (which isn’t the worst he could do, you understand: the film still survives, after all). Three prestige dramas in - The Young Victoria and Dallas Buyers Club are his babies also - I’m not entirely sure what it is that Vallée gets wrong about filmmaking, since it doesn’t seem to be the same thing every time. But in the case of Wild, it’s an enervating mixture of lead-footed obviousness and arch, artsy, pretentious-ass bullshit. A good portion of the film is given over to flashbacks to Cheryl's tragic and then dissolute life, and they are ushered into the film with the sophisticated grace of a rhinoceros driving a go-kart. Ham-handed visual links, foggy narrative cues, and pensive close-ups to Witherspoon's sad, shocked face, and then we're off into jagged montages of split-second shots of images from Cheryl's memory. It's hard to say if it's more hokey or annoying. And if there's no worse editing in the film than the flashback intros, it's not for want of trying: editors Martin Pensa and Vallée himself (under the pseudonym John Mac McMurphy) take undue joy in chopping the film all to hell, cutting together innocuous scenes of Cheryl walking or setting up her tent or sorting her supplies into a ratty series of jump cuts that require only "Yakety Sax" instead of Simon & Garfunkel's "El Condor Pasa (If I Could)" as the underscore to complete the effect (and boy, points for originality on picking that song as the repeating motif). It's acutely distracting, and coupled with the strained artiness of the symbolic flashbacks, the film's entire aesthetic feels like a half-assed attempt at doing a '60s European art film, so half-assed that it's closer to being a parody.

And as for the repeated use of a fox with its head adorably cocked to the side as the most symbolic symbol of them all: I don't know if that's on Hornby, or Vallée, or producer/spirit-guide Witherspoon, or anyone else involved, but shame on everyone who had the chance to say, "you guys, this is the worst idea", and didn't.

But let's go ahead and retrench to positivity for the wrap-up, because all things considered, Wild is a pretty fine, moving example of Oscarbait going more or less right. The story is terrific, and Witherspoon embodies it with vigor and gritty commitment, and the fact that the visuals used to express the story are kind of a shambles is... well, it's a fact, but there are worse facts to contend with.

7/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1997: In which there's no rule that says a dog can't play basketball

Not that one expects much out of a movie like Air Bud, but I still wasn't expecting it to reveal itself to be quite so vile quite so quickly. Very nearly the first thing that happens in the entire movie is a series of comic close-up shots of a little yellow bird, sitting on a tree, watching in amazed confusion as a truck with a giant clown head on its roof barrels down the road of a little town in Washington state. This bird never matters; it is not a character in the film, its opinions on the clown truck do not serve a purpose. It is simple an opportunity for actor-turned-director Charles Martin Smith to show off that he knows a thing or two about how editing works, and that the Kuleshov Effect can be used for evil as well as for good.

But anyway, Air Bud, a film whose considerable formal elements are not what I've gathered us here to discuss. You are perhaps wondering exactly what I have gathered us to discuss, given that Air Bud is not, I will boldly suggest, an especially important or interesting film. You know what is, though, is durable. Durable as a motherfucker. Not only did the film kick off four sequels, it also triggered a spin-off series and a spin-off of the spin-off, and we're now at the point where, sometime in 2015, the Buddiverse will welcome its 15th feature-length title. This feels kind of insane for a franchise whose target audience tops out around seven or eight years of age, but the Walt Disney Company doesn't play around when it comes to mining brands for extra revenue.

Like so many live-action Disney productions, Air Bud feels sort of like it was lab-created out of bits and pieces of already hidebound family comedies, and given a wardrobe and vocabulary that the middle-aged creators thought would be enough to freshen the whole thing up for The Kids These Days. In this particular case, we've got the classic "boy and his dog" scenario applied to a sports drama, with some very wobbly results. The situation goes thus: a golden retriever (Buddy, also of the execrable sitcom Full House, who died of cancer the year after Air Bud was released. If I just ruined your childhood, I am pleased, because these are some terrible things to have nostalgia for) runs away from his abusive clown owner, Norm Snively (Michael Jeter, weirdly receiving first billing for a teeny role), and hides out in the underbrush near an abandoned church. It is here that he's found by junior high student Josh Framm (Kevin Zegers), whose widowed mother (Wendy Makkena) has just moved the family into town while finding her footing. Thanks to the clown's training, Buddy - as Josh names the dog, whom he smuggles home before very long - is a whiz at handling a basketball, and this turns out be a boon when the school basketball team, for which Josh is manager, and later a player, needs itself a mascot. Of course, having a mascot dog that can shoot hoops is one thing (and it's a thing that drags Norm Snively out to reclaim his property, in a subplot that eventually involves a clichéd '30s-style "who are these kooks in my courtroom!?" finale), but having a dog that can actually play basketball in a competitive environment is another, and at no point has any human being ever started watching Air Bud in the ignorance of what was going to happen in the third act. Okay, not the courtroom scene. That came as quite a surprise, actually. But the scene of Buddy being a sports hero and saving the big game, that's pretty much the sole reason this film exists.

While we're idly waiting for Air Bud to get to the good part, Paul Tamasy & Aaron Mendelsohn's script flops around, flying through some plot developments and delaying others and stretching out moments randomly. I honestly don't know if it's the writing or directing that's responsible (though Smith's direction is so boringly competent, with the cleanliness and visual uniformity of a TV production, that I can't see how he could have gotten things off the rails just by himself), but Air Bud has legitimately awful pacing. It gets to the reveal that Buddy can play basketball almost immediately, and then makes absolutely no attempt to utilise that development for several reels; the return of Norm Snively happens at the worst time for the development of the "Josh learns self-reliance, teamwork, and discipline from playing sports, and from the wise black janitor/coach played by an obviously bored Bill Cobbs". For the last third of the movie, it's quite impossible to tell whether the film is a tween sports drama with a lengthy, distracting feint towards becoming a thriller about dog kidnapping, or if it's a family drama about protecting Buddy that rather oddly includes a lot of boilerplate sports movie nonsense while the plot is busy spinning its wheels.

The writing is so messy and aimless that when the film retrenches to generic kid flick mediocrity - like the slapstick dog bath scene, set without shame to "Splish Splash", or a slapstick car chase that ends with a truck plunging into water in a sequence that Smith's skills as director cannot manage to sell as funny in any way - it actually counts as a relief. For in those moments, at least Air Bud seems to have some awareness of what it is, and pursues its one goal with stronger focus than the inept balancing act between scenes and plotlines that leaves the film feeling directionless and overlong.

It's really astonishing just how terrible an innocuous kid's movie can actually be. Air Bud really is dreadful. It moves too arrhytmically to settle to a groove where it can be boring, and so it just keeps on being freshly irritating. The actors do the best they can with reedy material, and Zegers makes for a perfectly sturdy, it a little bit too sad-sacky protagonist, and the dog tricks are amusing enough once they start up (the "dog playing basketball" scene, with its dumbfounded reaction shots and befuddled dialogue, is legitimately enjoyable, though it comes about 70 minutes to late to do much good for the movie as a whole). But Air Bud is a toxic combination of blandly cheery aesthetic and stupid, sub-functional writing, and it ends up being a massively irritating pile of junk that isn't merely generic, disposable children's entertainment, it actually seems hellbent on making children less intelligent.

Meanwhile, I suppose you are wondering what in the hell this has to do with the development of American cinema between the years 1914 and 2014. Here's my pitch: the 1990s, that is to say the period from 1993-2001, seems to me a period in transition. The formulas that had fed the first Blockbuster Age in the 1980s had gone stale, the institutional memory of the 1970s kept prodding at the studios, which still at this point would fund midlevel dramas with some social import and character nuance for reasons other than hunting down Oscars, and there's a sense of trying to figure out a new vocabulary of big-budget popcorn cinema that could be sustainable over the long run. It is, in essence, a stretch of years where every Hollywood production, from top to bottom, seems to be looking back over its shoulder, and asking "what about this? can we make money doing this?".

And if there's anything that evokes the spirit of throwing shit against the wall just to see what happens and hope like hell it turns a profit better than the first entry in a low-budget 15-film Disney franchise of low-budget films about real-life dogs playing sports and having adventures, directed with sitcom-level artistry by a former member of the American Graffiti ensemble, I cannot imagine what it might possibly be.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1997
-James Cameron resinks the Titanic, makes enough money to have himself crowned King of the World
-Face/Off is the only film American-made John Woo film that anyone even pretends is any good
-Warner Bros. releases the terrible superhero movie Steel, starring basketball player and horrible actor Shaq, a relic of the days when feature films based on DC Comics properties were embarrassingly mismanaged clusterfucks

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1997
-Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry, and its daunting ending, pisses off almost as many cinephiles as it delights
-Pedro Costa begins what will prove to be a trilogy of docu-narrative films set in the poverty-blighted Fontainhas district of Lisbon, with Ossos
-Bowing to complaints that the final episodes of the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion were inscrutable, studio Gainax and director Anno Hideaki replace them with The End of Evangelion

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SPACE IS BIG. REALLY BIG. YOU JUST WON'T BELIEVE HOW VASTLY, HUGELY, MINDBOGGLINGLY BIG IT IS.

There is nothing small about Christopher Nolan's newest, longest film, the epic space drama Interstellar. Its strengths are as gargantuan and overpowering as its mighty flaws, and just as impossible to miss. I have absolutely no idea whether I liked it as a work of cinema, but I know this much for a dead certainty: it is worth seeing, and it is worth seeing on the biggest screen available, even with the known problem in the IMAX sound mix where Hans Zimmer's overly Philip Glassy score smothers the dialogue in a blanket of rampaging strings. Not since Avatar (a film whose dopey script looks like Chayefsky next to the structural disaster written by Nolan and his brother Jonathan) has there been a VFX-driven movie whose value is so clearly a function of letting it wash over you as a sensory event rather than trying to appreciate on the level of narrative.

It's easy to see how that could play as a criticism, but in fact, when a film's sensual elements are as rich and robust and emphatic as they are in the case of Interstellar, it's really not. Nolan has surrounded himself with a crack team of craftspeople, some of them new to his fold, and together they've built one of the most dumbfoundingly physical space movies in a generation: practical effects and sets whenever possible (courtesy of production designer Nathan Crowley), based on real-world observation of actual space programs and technology. When practical effects weren't possible, they were completed in advance of the shoot, so they could be projected behind the actors during the shoot, giving them something to play against that wasn't a green screen. And even here, there was much in the way of motion control model work. The results are not flawlessly realistic (the effects seen through the windows of the main spaceship tend to be a little overexposed, for one), but they are weighty in a way that only the very, very best CGI has ever been - if we weren't just a year away from Gravity, I'd be fairly well inclined to say that no effects-heavy film since The Lord of the Rings closed up shop has had a greater sense of its own physical reality. Paul Franklin, receiving his very own title card for supervising the visual effects, fully earns that odd crediting rarity; the film is his brainchild as much as it is anybody's.

It's a pridefully old-school approach to making a pridefully old-school movie: Interstellar is indebted, rather openly, to the hard science fiction of the mid-20th Century, focusing on science as a problem solving tool and technology as an extension of current thought rather than a magical fantasy element. And human characters are stripped-down and spare, functional objects that exist mostly to do the science and wield the technology. Sometimes. Mostly. It's where the film starts to get itself into trouble a bit.

Here's the deal: Interstellar is, like, five movies, playing out mostly in order. First, there's the "we used up the future, and Earth is dying" opening, in which we meet former fighter pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), his father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow), and his children Tom (Timothée Chalamet), a teenager, and Murphy (Mackenzie Foy), a 10-year-old. But not his wife. She's dead. This is a Nolan picture. Then there's Cooper's discovery that, in secret, the U.S. government has kept the space program alive to work on developing a "get the hell off the Earth" program, under the guidance of wizened Dr. Brand (Michael Caine). Then there's the actual mission, with Cooper, Brand's daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway), physicist Romily (David Gyasi), and geologist Doyle (Wes Bentley) all trekking through a mysteriously convenient wormhole to explore a trio of potential Earth-2s. And there are between two and three more movies after that, but I can't go farther without hitting spoiler territory.

Anyway, the film occupies a billion different tonal registers, veering from the mercilessly austere hard science of the second and third chunks, all the way the the weepy sentimentality of... also the third chunk, since that's when the effects of relativity cause Murphy to grow up into a resentful adult played by Jessica Chastain, working with Dr. Brand as a way of focusing her rage at her dad into something useful. And there are rare communications between them, and really fucking amazing cross-cutting, courtesy of Lee Smith, Nolan's usual editor. And here the characters feel deep, passionate feelings, and Zimmer's Glass impression shifts gears to be far more weepy and romantic. Sometimes it works - Cooper's discovery of a whole package of video messages charting his family's growth over years while he was being time dilated is one of the best moments in the film, boasting a wordless, heartbreaking performance by McConaughey that's unequivocally the best acting anywhere in the movie. Sometimes it doesn't work, like in the agonising, endless first half hour, when the Nolans laboriously set up their family dynamic in long scenes that have heard of narrative efficiency only as something for puny mortal directors who have budgetary restrictions.

The whole script is a car wreck, heavily over-emphasising some details and skipping madly over others, building a world that is excruciatingly spelled out with details that make no sense - like a scene that plays out for minutes and minutes, establishing that the government has declared the moon landing of the ancient past to be a hoax, although what conceivable reason they'd have for doing this is unclear, and what reason Interstellar has for making us watch characters who theoretically know this already to carefully, leadenly hash it out is even less clear (for that matter, given the world the movie depicts - the economy has collapsed, agriculture is collapsing, and people have apparently retrenched into semi-anarchic rural enclaves - why is there still a U.S. government at all?). But then, painfully stretched-out delivery of expository dialogue between two people who both know all the things they're describing happens a lot in Interstellar, and it's never natural, but sometimes it is useful. Even if you walk in a complete neophyte on the worlds of quantum physics and general relativity, you surely will know a lot about them when you walk out. Or, at least, the reductive version the Nolans need to make their plot go.

But even as the story wanders in tiny circles for ages, stopping with gobsmacked amazement for draggy scenes of little value, for every one annoyance, Interstellar offers up two moments of pure visceral movie magic. It is, for the most part, not a film where Nolan's sometimes-notorious difficult in organically stitching two shots together has resolved itself; their are difficulties in figuring out the layout of certain key spaces that pervade the whole movie. But the individual images themselves are so dauntingly huge - and I can't over-stress that this movie begs and craves to be seen in IMAX - and so impressively captured by Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (stepping in for absent Nolan regular Wally Pfister), and Franklin, that the relationship between shots is simply never as important as the impact shots make themselves. There are moments of genius - generally, cross-cutting between Cooper on the spaceship and Murphy on Earth is done with a fluidity and sensibility that creates more human meaning than the script ever does, though the final action scene, cross-cutting madly, is kind of ridiculously over-the-top.

But that's the thing: Interstellar moves from brilliance to absolute ineptitude and back regularly and freely. Just about the only thing that's not true of is the acting: with the script bathed in the traditions of hard sci-fi, hardly any of the characters have room for more than the impression of inner life, which means that such gifted people as McConaughey, Chastain, Hathaway, Lithgow, and others whose parts are so small I didn't even get to them are largely there to add gravitas to undernourished roles, but not to do very much real capital-A acting. It's easy for Interstellar to forget its human elements; they are not what it finds interesting, and when it focuses on them, it's usually embarrassingly ripe. But at least the top-shelf cast inhabits their thin stock types with presence and solidity that give the film just enough of an anchor that when it tries to be an emotionally resonant character drama, it kind of feels like it might work, even if it never quite makes it. Anyway, it's not as befuddlingly confused about what makes for plausible human behavior as The Dark Knight Rises, so, I don't know, progress?

7/10

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LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL

To get the grubby part out of the way first: Life Itself is a somewhat banal piece of documentary craftsmanship. A lot of talking heads, e-mails represented by onscreen text, old clips. It's something we've all see a billion times, and it is frankly disappointing that Steve James, the man who made the expansive epic of African-American teenage life Hoop Dreams and the exemplary social commentary boots-on-the-ground vérité piece The Interrupters would make something so gosh-darned safe, aesthetically speaking.

Now that's the nitpicky part, whereas the important part is that Life Itself doesn't really have any cause to be aesthetically complex or outrageously creative. It is a tribute to an individual man, as fully fleshed-out as any one depiction of any one human being might need to be. That man being Roger Ebert, the film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and co-host of a succession of "dueling critics" TV shows with Gene Siskel over the course of more than two decades, and the inspiration for more current professional and amateur movie critics than anyone else who has ever lived. And of course, because movie reviews are written by movie reviewers, that makes it kind of hard for any of us - the present author happily discloses himself as having been intoxicated by Ebert's writing ability and obvious, overriding love of the art-form, long before I ever even dreamed of doing it myself - to take a genuinely objective view on what James has given us. It is a love letter that's incredibly difficult for most cinephiles to disagree with, and a deeply sweet, affecting balm on what remains, for a lot of people, a still-raw wound all this time after Ebert's death in April, 2013.

But a lack of objectivity is kind of the point of the thing. This is not about Steve James studying a famous man, but eulogising a person to whom he owed much (Siskel & Ebert basically created his career with their effusive love for Hoop Dreams), a friend he came to know well during the last few months of the critic's life, as he worked with James on creating the film that he eventually realised he wouldn't be alive to see completed. James's Ebert is personally warm, quick-witted even when his quips have to be translated through the electronic voice program Ebert relied in his last years, and a clear enthusiast for movies and for living. It's a view largely reflected by the wide range of interview subjects from his closest friends to other critics, not all of whom have had terribly kind things to say about Ebert's contributions to cinema studies. And even his friends are disinterested in whitewashing Ebert's crazed past, his peccadilloes, his occasional selfishness, and his irritable relationship with best frenemy Siskel, a professional rivalry that had some real nasty flickers on the edges, to judge from what we see (James includes footage of the two men bitching each other out while filming promos for their show; if Life Itself served absolutely no other function besides putting that footage out in the world, it would be worth every penny).

The small genius of Life Itself is that it is a film about a generous and open soul that is itself generous and open; eager to embrace Ebert for his fullness and messiness as a critic and a person, and thus reflecting the version of the man it depicts. It's structured to largely take place in the last months of Ebert's life, looking backwards to tell his story but always returning to the hospital where Ebert went through one health crisis after another with the support of his wife Chaz. The contrast between Ebert's late physical impairment and the ebullience of his younger days is striking, but James doesn't use it to beg for sympathy on his subject's behalf; instead, it's a way of throwing into sharp relief how Ebert had only deepened in his appreciation for living even as life became a chain of disgusting, obviously uncomfortable medical procedures and an increasingly circumscribed ability to move. There is never a moment when he complains, or bemoans his fate; the overall impression is of a man greatly at peace with his impending death, and anxious to find the pleasure and beauty in every day he had left.

It sounds trite in its uplifting, inspiring sentiment, but so fully based in the very specific details of who Ebert was and how he thought that it never even once comes over as a bit of pandering "let the cripple show us the way!" exploitation. Mostly, it's getting to learn a great deal about one person, and finding out that he was sensitive, prickly, loving, egocentric, and above all things an infectious communicator of ideas. Inasmuch as it's a hagiography - and I suppose it's awfully hard to claim otherwise - it's a hagiography of Ebert the person that James studied and observed, not a hagiography of Ebert the movie critic.

Of course it has its decent share of flaws, including some fuzzy generalisations about the non-Ebert state of criticism (Pauline Kael, by no means a favorite of mine, deserves better than she gets), and while I understand James's decision to have voice actor Stephen Stanton read excerpts from Ebert's blog and memoirs in an almost-but-not-quite perfect impression of the critic, it never quite managed to stop feeling ghoulish, for my tastes. And it is a pretty straightforward biopic-documentary; immensely likable but always more impressive on the level of content than craft - though that content, including surprisingly personable chats with directors legendary (Martin Scorsese) and obscure (Ava DuVernay), and the always delightful archival footage of Ebert getting into hissing matches with Siskel, is absolutely terrific stuff.

Anyway, James isn't trying to be clever or cunning, but simply to be honest; and he is wonderfully honest indeed. It is a warm film but too intimate not to include some uncomfortable moments, gross truths about the human body, and the occasional moment of bleak sorrow. And it fully lives up to the demand that the subject made in an e-mail to his last chronicler, in explaining why he wanted James to push on through the nastiness even though Chaz would object:

It would be a major lapse to have a documentary that doesn't contain the full reality.

I wouldn't want to be associated. This is not only your film.

Cheers,
R

8/10

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN THE LATE '90s, or: SNOWMAN'S LAND

Those of you who've been around for a while have undoubtedly picked up on my certain disdain for movies that play the "we know we're making a bad movie, so it's actually funny that our movie is bad" card. And oh my Lord, does the 1997 direct-to-video Jack Frost lean on that conceit as unrelentingly as it possibly can. I'd say that it's just the usual post-Scream meta-horror nonsense, except that based on the dates involved, I'm pretty certain that there was no time for Jack Frost to have been influenced by that slasher satire. So nope, the filmmakers managed to come up with this one all on their own, bless their hearts.

I am not, of course, claiming that Jack Frost should have been made with a great deal of sincerity and seriousess. It's a film about a serial killer cannibal whose body merges with snow and leaves him a murderous, psychopathic snowman. I am among those who subscribes to the philosophy that there are no poor ideas for movies, only poor execution, but "psycho snowman slasher" is an idea that's close enough to objectively poor that a deliberate self-parody is probably the only approach that might have been acceptable even a little bit. The film is comedy as much as it is horror; I think it's important to acknowledge that, because the last thing one ever wants to do is to arrive in the position that others might accuse him of not "getting" Jack Frost, of all damn movies. For I understand it has quite the appreciative cult following these days.

But it's one thing to get the movie, and another to enjoy the experience on any level whatsoever, and this is where Jack Frost loses me. Indeed, it's largely because it's so open about its own conceptual badness, and the poverty of its execution, and the general stupidity of all the things onscreen that I found it rather enervating to watch. When you're confronted with something so obviously unacceptable as Jack Frost, the best thing to do is to mock it; this is the crux of bad movie fandom. But there's simply no fun at all in mocking a movie that comes as pre-digested as this, making all of its own jokes at its own expense, insisting on its own insincerity, flaunting the shabbiness of its effects work. Jack Frost is a movie that doesn't require a viewer, in essence. And there's something intensely alienating about dealing with such a prospect.

But deal with it we shall. Things open promisingly enough, with some genuinely creative opening credits that showcase all the actors and crew heads' names on ornaments on a Christmas tree, as an unseen and uncredited Uncle Henry tells a holiday story to his niece, who has asked for something both happy and scary. And things cease to be promising, because the (obviously adult) actor voicing the niece elected to pitch her voice at such a squeaky whine that it takes all of five or six syllables before listening to her has become completely, absolutely intolerable. Thankfully, this narrative framework never reappears, and nobody in the actual cast is half as obnoxious, but it's a quick, easy way for the movie to earn itself some enemies even before it has shown the first human being.

The story Uncle Henry tells is, he claims, set in more or less real time, as a famous killer named Jack Frost (Scott MacDonald) - his actual birth name, we are led to believe, which speaks ill of his parents - is being trucked from prison to the execution site, which isn't how executions work. But movies need beginnings, and there are plenty of other reasons to be mad at the plot later on. What happens, in a nutshell, is that Frost manages to kill one of his guards, and in the confusion the execution truck plows into a tanker from a genetic research company, allowing Jack to escape just long enough to get doused in a jet of some kind of outrageously caustic acid that melts his flesh and bone down to nothing, and the liquid that used to be the killer merges with snow. And then starts throbbing.

The action then cuts to Snowmonton, the snowman capital of the world, as it pretty much would have to be. Here, it is time for the annual snowman contest, which is apparently such a big deal that every molecule of frozen water has been swept from the city streets to form the snowmen being carved in the town square, because Snowmonton is, in virtually every shot we see throughout the film, totally devoid of snow. In fairness, that was just a freak accident - among the man one-liners peppering the end credits, we see references to freak weather that left Big Bear Lake, California totally devoid of winter during the period that Jack Frost's producers had arranged to shoot there. Such are the vicissitudes of no-budget filmmaking.

Anyway, in this sleepy little town, we find the local sheriff Sam Tiler (Christopher Allport), who happens to have been the exact law enforcement agent to take down Frost in the first place. He has these many months been plagued by doubts concerning a threat the killer left that he would take his revenge, and apparently has been worried all along that Frost would find a way to escape. He probably didn't assume that way would involve becoming a sentient matrix of H₂O who can melt or freeze at will, and spends most of his time in the form of a snowman completed by Sam's son Ryan (Zack Eginton), with his coal eyes and carrot nose following along as he morphs, despite neither coal nor carrots being subject to the same freezing point as water.

Sam's laconic presence and his friendly relationship with the Snowmontonians having put us squarely in Twin Peaks territory (an impression solidified by the scenes set in the cutesily ineffectual sheriff's office), it only makes sense when the film starts copying from The X-Files as well, in the form of a secret government conspiracy to retrieve Frost. And so we have FBI Agent Manners (Stephen Mendel) and a scientist named Stone (Rob LaBelle) onhand to be mysterious and get in Sam's way, and not tell him any of the things he might need to ensure that his community doesn't end up entirely dead. Though they have no way of guessing at the scope of Frost's abilities to manipulate his form, which includes being able to shoot dagger-sharp icicles on top of everything else.

There's no point in harping on how stupid this is, since the film already knows that - since the film, in fact, prides itself on being stupid. But it's still not very entertaining to watch. "Bad on purpose" goes only as far as the filmmakers' sense of humor and irony, and the creators of Jack Frost - who are largely just Michael Cooney (director and writer) and Jeremy Paige (producer and co-scenarist) - have some pretty lead-footed jokes up their sleeve. Frost is a quipster killer: he has to be, since the budget permitted only a really dodgy snowman puppet whose mouth barely moves, and which is otherwise not articulated. So we get a lot of one-liners, most of which aren't funny at all, and some of which don't even make sense. At one point, for example, Frost has taken over a victim's body, but gives up and allows himself to be vomited out. Having thus reformed, he snarks "Don't eat yellow snow!", à propos of nothing happening in that moment. I suppose there are only so many thematically tight puns a snowman killer can make, but some semblance of a relationship between ideas would have been appreciated.

That relationship holds true for essentially everything in the movie. The plot, at its most basic, is a "killer comes back for revenge" situation, but most of Frost's actions have no motivation at all. He kills an old man with absolutely no connection to anything in the rest of the movie; he then merciless hunts down all the members of a family who happen to live in Snowmonton, but are otherwise quite uninvolved in Sam's life. Although the last surviving member of that family, Jill (Shannon Elizabeth), is preparing to have sex with her boyfriend (Darren Campbell) in Sam's house when Frost catches up with her and kills her, so that's kind of a thing that is in any way part of the story. This is after Frost goes all the way out of town to kill a deputy (Brian Leckner) and still his police cruiser.

It feels like one thing only: an attempt to inflate a running time by adding in a bunch of spurious deaths, pure slasher movie boilerplate. It's funny only in that it's insincere, and because Frost can't help but say zany things; I feel like it's a movie for people who absolutely adored the later Nightmare on Elm Street movies, the ones where Freddy Krueger had largely turned into a murdering stand-up comedian; it shares their disregard for cohesion and absolutely ghastly wordplay. So it's much too jokey to work for even a single scene as horror (though I can imagine the more squeamish being thrown for a loop by Frost's initial disintegration, or by his ultimate demise), with its crap one-liners and its straitlaced absurdity, and its electronic keyboard score borrowing heavily and ironically from traditional Christmas carols. And it's much too shouty, snotty, and mean to be effect as comedy. Perhaps with more tastelessness, as in the early work of Peter Jackson, this could have been something; but the filmmakers couldn't afford to be tasteless. The scene where Frost rapes Jill to death is tasteless, I suppose, but not in the right way, not at all. I was mostly glad that the filmmakers refrained from having that rape come in the form of him penetrating her with his carrot nose, as the blocking seemed eager to foreshadow at one point; but the point where we arrive at "it was such a relief when it didn't include the most objectionable possible rape scene", we have scraped through the bottom of the barrel and dug a rather comfortably-sized hole in the ground beneath it.

I will concede that there are things about I liked. Allport's plain, taciturn performance actually works pretty well - it's the only thing in the entire movie that feels like it actually falls in the "played straight for laughs" register that the film's fanbase sees in every detail. And I greatly admired the hammy sassiness of Marsha Clark as the sheriff's office secretary. Cooney also did a surprisingly good job placing the camera, considering the scale of the production: both in his cleverness in hiding the snow-free locations, and in stagins some genuinely inventive visual jokes, something for which I was deeply grateful amidst all the arch irony.

Anyway, it is the most perfect late-'90s horror film imaginable: gimmicky to the point of idiocy, and post-modern in the most irritating conceivable way, an equal failure of both horror and comedy. If it at least came by its badness honestly, its ineptitude and styrofoam-covered-in-felt snowman suit might have at least been charming; but as it is, the film's self-awareness just makes it tediously smug.

Body Count: 12, though one is more implied than shown, and also the 38 murders Frost committed prior to the film's opening, which is a massively cheap way to make your killer seem more dangerous than we ever see him onscreen.

* * * * *

But wait! What about that OTHER terrifying movie from the late '90s called Jack Frost?

It says everything that the titular character character from the 1997 Jack Frost is the soul of a serial killer, who turned his victims into meat pies, inhabiting a snowman who murders people, including one whose face he bites off with his icicle teeth, and he can't be compared even a little bit to the visceral, Lovecraftian horror of the titular character from the 1998 Jack Frost, which is a fantasy movie for children.

Basically, it's a horrible Christmas-themed version of the musical Carousel (or, if you want to be snooty, the play Liliom, upon which Carousel was based), in which a middle-aged man on the cusp of his big break as a rock star ignores his son, dies, is reincarnated as a snowman, and learns how to be a better father. It's entirely possible that this would work, somewhat, if the snowman wasn't voiced by Michael Keaton, an actor who is frequently capable of greatness, but whose line deliveries tend towards an edgy, tightly-coiled energy that suggest somebody ready to blow just underneath the words; and given Jack Frost's tendency to speak largely in snow-related quips (seriously, the two Jack Frost pictures are fucking indistinguishable, except that in one of them the bully loses a snowball fight, and in the other the bully is decapitated with a sled), this makes him seem like a bent rage addict funneling all his anger into caustic humor (it's way too reminiscent of the performance he gave in Beetlejuice, actually, and that's just not okay). There's one particularly grim moment of soul-sucking wordplay where the snowman and his son are celebrating a shared triumph, and Jack says, "You da man!", because remember, this was made in the late '90s, and his son Charlie (Joseph Cross) replies, "No, you da man!", and Jack quips back, "Nope! I'm the snowman! HAH HAH HAH". And as lamentable as that pun is, and emblematic of how dire and insulting the bulk of Mark Steven Johnson's screenplay is, the part that really goes from, "oh, what a routinely lousy children's movie", to "GOD GET IT OFF ME IT'S BURNING" is that fake, forced laugh, Keaton coughing out the sounds of mirth so unnaturally that if he had immediately turned around and ripped the boy's head off with his eerie branch arms with their floppy, flat little mitten hands, it would have been infinitely more understandable than the filmmakers' desire that we find this cute.

So Keaton's a problem. But even he is only the second-biggest liability in the film, for he is but the voice and briefly-human precursor of Jack the Snowman, an eldritch abomination if I ever did see one. It's a singularly persuasive piece of machinery built by the Jim Henson Creature Shop (there are a few shots in which it is played by a glossy CGI effect, as well), but "persuasive" means here only that it is convincing in its movements as something living, not that it actually convinces as an animated snowman. And it fails even more at seeming even slightly appealing or friendly - it looks like a perversity of nature, moving its horrible, rubbery mouth and flexing its horrible, overly expressive facial features, and staring with its unpleasantly small eyes that look pitch black (black as coal, you might say) in all but bright, direct light, in which case you can see the glue-grey irises around the edges of those eyes. And begad, if the deep black eyes with nothing behind them but the infinity of death are freaky, the eyes with just enough detail to look vaguely human are much, much worse.

Other than the fact that its protagonist was issued from a rank pit of Hell to torment the godly, Jack Frost is actually pretty blandly generic kiddie filmmaking, with no story really deserving of the name: Jack was so busy with his career that he almost missed Christmas, but decided just in the nick of time to head to be with his son and wife Gabby (Kelly Preston). But a freak snowstorm hit, and he crashed his car and died. He died on Christmas Day. If nothing else, I admire it for having the balls to go there. The snowballs, I would say, except that the movie already makes, like, five puns about snow balls, and I don't want to relive them.

So anyway, Jack comes back and life lessons, though the stakes of the film are so ungodly low that I couldn't really tell you why the universe would bother bending its rules to make this miracle happen. And Charlie himself seems largely unmoved; the emotional beats, at least as they are played by the actors and director Troy Miller, would be entirely unchanged if Jack had simply disappeared for months after a boring, run-of-the-mill divorce (an impression strengthened by how very little Preston gets to do, mostly just looking alarmed in reaction shots and never interacting with the snowman until the film's penultimate scene). There's absolutely no overarching plot, simply scenes during which the snowman thaws Charlie's resentment, and eventually teaches him some hockey tips, and then when enough scenes have transpired to make a feature, there's a brief race against time leading arbitrarily into a desultory wrap-up, suggesting that Johnson understood that copying E.T. was a safe bet, but didn't care why.

It is, unsurprisingly, not very good cinema. Miller and the hilariously overqualified cinematographer László Kovács (the things that happened to that man's career after the 1980s started up are indescribably depressing) are hellbent on close-ups that use the anamorphic frame in the most artless way: a lot of heads just kind of bobbing around in oppressive widescreen space. There are some clumsy attempts at kinetic editing, and the most aesthetically distinctive thing about the film is its unusually brutish soundtrack, beginning with a hard-rock cover of "Frosty the Snowman" played by Jack's band, moving on past a dumbfounding use of Fleetwood Mac's melancholic and not at all child-appropriate "Landslide", apparently because it has the words "snow-covered" in the lyrics, and arriving at a singularly unforgivable cover of "Gimme Some Lovin'" by Hanson, because remember, this was made in the late '90s.

Basically, it is everything I have ever hated about children's entertainment combined in one place: canned emotions and deadening plot points of the utmost predictability crammed together with shrill, sardonic anti-humor and a lazy reliance on musical montages to paper over the sucking holes in the conflict. Add the viscerally unappealing central character, and the whole thing is just the absolute pits. It took a lot to be the worst reincarnation fantasy titled Jack Frost from the second half of the 1990s, but by golly, they found a way.

Body Count: Just the one.

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