A GREAT SUCKING FORCE FROM WHICH NO LIGHT CAN ESCAPE

There's no value in the critic pointing out that a new film doesn't matter because an old film got there first. But there's also no real value in a new film trying to cover material that won't ever be improved upon. The thing is, Errol Morris already made A Brief History of Time, and there's simply not much about the life and work of Stephen Hawking that the 80-minute documentary left on the table. That is to say, not unless you actually want to teach dense physics and mathematics to a general audience in film form, in which case there's plenty that Morris overlooked. But that's certainly not the gap that the new Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything is interested in bridging, and so we return to the question of, for serious, why? Why, after 23 years, make a film on this topic that is in every way more shallow and superficial and totally disinterested in the actual meaning of Hawking's work than a perfectly fine documentary by one of the very small number of superstar documentarians? Morris managed in the opening ten minutes of his movie to draw more elegant connections between Hawking's life, physical condition, and mental gymnastics than Theory director James Marsh and writer Anthony McCarten are able to whip up in two hours, using almost exactly the same anecdotes.

Really, though, that's a second-order problem with the movie. The larger problem with The Theory of Everything is generic: it does absolutely nothing to nudge the biopic formula from its most tediously standard form. The only way this could feel more boilerplate is if it took place in the form of flashbacks immediately before Hawking was set to receive some kind of lifetime achievement award (and it does, in fact, end with such an event). Otherwise we have yet another difficult genius with yet another suffering wife, and the film's interest in said genius beyond "he's so important and famous!" could not possibly be more superficial. Its interest in said wife is even less: considering that the film was adapted by Anthony McCarten from the second of Jane Hawking's two memoirs about life with her ex-husband, it's downright befuddling that its version of Jane (played by Felicity Jones) is so marginalised at every turn, given no interiority whatsoever other than a generic Christianity to contrast with her husband's agnosticism, and treated more as the woman-shaped object who looks fretfully on as Stephen (Eddie Redmayne) strains and falls and has cutting insights into the structure of the universe. I have never been terribly bowled over by Jones before, but this doesn't even count: there are actresses in this world who could force the film to respect their act of character creation and insist on Jane as an important anchor for this movie, but there aren't more than two scenes in the entire movie that support that kind of work, and a great many that actively deny it.

And so we get a cheery tale of how one man can overcome physical limitations to achieve intellectual greatness, though The Theory of Everything, expansive title of no, has only very little interest in what Hawking's work actually means or implies. It is no more about science than Pollock was about painting or Julie & Julia was about cooking, and less than A Beautiful Mind was about mathematics. Stephen Hawking is interesting to the film solely as the emblem the filmmakers could hold up of an inspiring figure who just Wouldn't Give Up, not when he was given two years to live (50 years later and Hawking still with us, that estimate seems somewhat pessimistic), not when he... no, it's pretty much just the first thing. Among its other sins as a work of writing, The Theory of Everything seems to be of the opinion that radical scientific insight comes all at once and you get it right the first time, and so it's just down to being inspiring as you struggle against your deteriorating body to deliver those flawless pearls of cosmological wisdom.

The film oscillates between superficial treatments of science and corny moments of "you can do it!" kitten-hanging-from-a-branch bromides - among the latter I would include the desperately tawdry scene where Hawking imagines himself rising from his chair to pick up a woman's pen, while Jóhann Jóhannsson's music shamelessly soars and weeps on the soundtrack; the worst single thing in the film, especially coming hard as it does upon a mechanical "tell us all your thoughts on God" Q&A - and it serves primarily to reduce the work of an enormously important scientist and thinker to the background for a deeply uninteresting story about a marriage that the filmmakers can't persuade themselves or us to care about. Not while leaving Jane as such a bland stock type.

Compounding its flatness as a drama, it's pretty slackly made: director James Marsh, who really is so much better when he sticks to documentaries, relies on boxy frames throughout that make this feel like an unusually polished BBC production, while he and cinematographer Benoît Delhomme go all-in on a weird program of exaggerated color timing that leaves entire scenes feeling tinted - that blue bar where they met, that bright yellow day at Oxford when Stephen was fucking around not studying, things like that. It's like watching one of Steven Soderbergh's color-driven narratives from around the turn of the 2000s with all the discipline and purpose stripped out of it. Plus, everything is delicately faded out and softened, all of it look nostalgic and waxy, like a soap commercial about academics. There's cross-cutting that makes several obnoxious, obvious comparisons like the one where Stephen is just like another kid Jane has to take care of! or the one where Jane thinks about having an affair while Stephen is getting sick! And this is far preferable to the film's exhausting over-reliance on montages to gallop through its fuzzy chronology, a hacky trick that I'd though we had, as a culture, mocked out of existence.

Redmayne is pretty great, I have to give him that. It's perhaps an obvious part and he plays it obviously, but the physical mechanics of showing the progression of Hawking's ALS are mapped out with exacting precision, and it's an impressive work of corralling physical gimmickry into character building, if nothing else. It's not the best imaginable performance of Hawking that could be given (according to most who have seen it - I have not - it adds nothing that Benedict Cumberbatch didn't already do in the 2004 television movie Hawking), it's more than this rickety display of shallow humanism requires. Otherwise, there's barely anything here at all: nothing but the most uninspired, paint-by-numbers storytelling and filmmaking technique imaginable in a genre where those pitfalls gape more dangerously than in any other.

5/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2006-2013: In which I explain how this is going to work

We've reached an exciting milestone in the Hollywood Century project: the existence of this blog in the time frame we're looking back to. And just like that, the number of candidates I have for review is suddenly slashed dramatically, since I'm loath to write about something that I've already talked about, even if it was 7 or 8 years ago. And many if not most of the best subjects for this little hoedown of mine are now off-limits.

And so, as we enter the final leg, a major shift in focus becomes necessary, accompanied by a simple rule to make sure I don't get too desperate to find movies to write about: going forward, I'm going to write about the highest-grossing film at the U.S. box office for every year, that I haven't previously reviewed. This brings us to some fun places. It also brings us to a hell of a lot more places that are not fun at all, and therefore I continue the great Antagony & Ecstasy tradition of ending series with a long, slow death rattle of mediocrity and suffering. But now, at least, you know why I avoided seeing The Heat last year: it kept Grown Ups 2 out of the lead position.

Things are going to wrap up on 25 December, with a review from 2014 itself, the first year of the second century of the Hollywood feature. Just nine more years to go!

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2005: In which products are placed

Transformers and its sequels are not very brainy films. I think that we can all agree on that, regardless of how we specifically feel about the films otherwise. They are, in fact, about as non-brainy as science fiction cinema gets. And this is typically held against them by people and critics who would like our movies to trigger some distinguishable amount of mental activity in the viewer's mind while partaking of them. But we should not get too angry when director Michael Bay makes stupid movies. Even if he is, arguably, doing more to dumb down humanity than any other individual human being now living. Because the thing is, we know what happens when Michael Bay tries to make a smart movie, a movie expressing concepts about where society is and where society's headed and what that means. That movie looks like The Island, from 2005, and as long as Bay never makes another one of those, he can crap out all the movies about giant space robots he cares to.

The Island is a movie about cloning, so it makes sense that it is itself a clone of 1979's Parts: The Clonus Horror, covered in a sheen of brightly colored metallic cinematography. In 2019, there is a strange facility that's all white, full of people in sleek jumpsuits, whose every need is monitored by computers and administred by a population who aren't wearing jumpsuits and generally don't look as buffed and tidy as the jumpsuit wearers. Every so often - once or twice a week - one of the pretty people wins the lottery, and is sent to the Island, the last place on the surface of the planet that can still support life, all these years after a terrible contamination broke out. Living in this sterile paradise is a certain Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor), who possesses something that none of the other jumpsuit people do: a sense of curiosity. And this sense of curiosity, leading him to wonder why and how this place exists, leads him into some corners that his minders would much prefer he not investigate. The head of the facility, Dr. Bernard Merrick (Sean Bean) is beginning to put together the reports suggesting Lincoln's aberrant behavior and preparing to act on them, when Lincoln's best friend, Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson) wins a trip to the Island, almost exactly at the same time that his explorations lead him to the discovery that "the Island" turns out to be a euphemism for "the room where they harvest your organs and kill you". He's able to escape with Jordan to the world outside the facility, with Merrick hiring a paramilitary team led by Albert Laurent (Djimon Hounsou) to hunt them down. The facility, it turns out, is a big clone factory, with its population serving as organ suppliers for the elite who want to insure themselves against sickness and disease. Lincoln is merely the first in a whole batch of clones gone bad, and if Merrick can't contain him, in short order the whole business will be in jeopardy.

Good, sturdy sci-fi parable stuff, at least for the first half; the second half, in which Lincoln and Jordan race through Los Angeles trying to avoid Laurent and find Tom Lincoln, the boat designer from whom Lincoln was cloned, is junk food. And not even tasty junk food, just the normal, Michael Bay kind of junk food, with too much cutting and unpleasantly harsh saturation - the cinematographer working this time to bring Bay's visions to life being Mauro Fiore, though all Bay films kind of look the same. Only without any particularly decent setpieces to at least showcase Bay's facility with choreographing chaos (the only halfway decent action sequence is a chase on a futuristic motorcycle that suffers from having low stakes, given its placement in the narrative).

But even the earlier material is pretty Bay-ish, and while Bay's hyper-polished TV commercial aesthetic is familiar enough to be invisible when he's just throwing shit around L.A., placing it in the context of a highly artificial science fiction setting driven by inventive production design (by Nigel Phelps, one of the handful of invididuals who can hold his head high about what he did here) is jarring and gross. Particularly since The Island already courts comparisons to a TV commercial so openly. It was a film on the cutting edge of new and aggressive ways to be awful, and it infamously included product placement the like of which the world had never seen. Not that product placement was new in 2005, nor has it died out since, but The Island was something of a case study in just how much of it a single summer tentpole could be laden with before audiences revolted. Less than this, as it turned out. I was all set to document some of it with images, but YouTube user Ben Duchac did a better job of it. And even having watched the movie immediately prior to finding that video, I still wasn't prepared for how hilariously unapologetic some of the shots are. And Ben didn't even include all of it.

(Though he did include my single favorite shot, of an Aquafina bottle being dropped right down in the middle of frame; I hadn't seen the movie in nine years prior to watching it for this review, but I remembered the details of that shot like it was footage of my first child being born).

The problem with this isn't merely that we don't, as a rule, like to have our entertainment interrupted by infomercials for Nokia. Though Christ knows that's bad enough. The problem is that The Island, by virtue of being at least nominally an ideas-driven sci-fi film set in the far-flung world of 2019, has to invite us into that world; it has to present the setting in a way that visually makes sense and feels unified. It has to feel like a place that is plausible and organic. And putting Aquafina and X-Box everywhere in the hermetically isolated world of the clone facility does exactly the opposite of all that. It calls our attention to a space without rules beyond "the producers made some money for including this shot", and makes it impossible to seriously consider this as a place that could exist and do anything at all like the movie requires it to. And that, right there, is Michael Bay doing brainy sci-fi: the first chance he gets to sacrifice its integrity and dignity for the sake of a product shot, he'll do it. At least the segments of Transformers that function as overt car commercials fit the milieu.

That's not something The Island can survive: the dipshit screenplay needs all the help from the visuals that it can get. This was the big-screen debut of writers Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci, working on an original script by Caspian Tredwell-Owen, and it is a fine launchpad for a joint career that has included some of the highest-profile bad screenwriting in contemporary cinema. The central concept hangs together, barely, but the second half fairly baldly announces itself as the nonsensical shuttling from one jumbled action moment to the next, tethered by  inscrutable, shifting characters (Jordan is basically a different person in the film's second half, though Johansson's performance doesn't help matters there), and terrible dialogue. The exposition comes out lumpy and forced  and the jokes - the childlike clones are confused by the human world! - are one-note and juvenile. McGregor salvages as much as he can with a performance that's much better than the film deserves, confused but also petulant innocence gradually evolving into cunning and sorry worldliness. But that's the only thing that works on a human level in this film where Michael Bay has decided to look more at humans than explosions. It is a dismal mistake; Bay's crowd-pleasing instincts fully abandoned him on this one (that, or he hard a hard time surviving the split from producer and crowd-pleaser expert Jerry Bruckheimer, who had overseen all of Bay's earlier films), and audiences rewarded The Island with the lowest gross of any of Bay's films.

It's not all a wash: the conception of the future is a bit silly and feels like it's ripping off Minority Report in ways that don't make sense (Los Angeles, 2019: City of ski lift trains), but it's a good movie to rip off, and while the movie does some terrible things with its setting, at least it looks nice. And Steve Jablonsky's generally satisfactory score includes one legitimately classic cue, "My Name Is Lincoln", a sweeping chant-driven piece of film-ending uplift that has been in as many trailers as any other piece of film music of the 21st Century.

But that's lipstick on a pig if ever I saw it. The Island is a dreadful waste of concept and setting, and a grim example of the worst impulses of Hollywood filmmaking in the 2000s given unfettered room to flourish. It is as perfectly mercenary in its execution as any motion picture possibly could be, and while the filmmaking discipline of commerce first, artistry a distant second is still with us, of course, we can all be glad that The Island tanked; it points to a far bleaker and more crudely market-driven cinema than even the one we now live with.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2005
-With no forewarning, mainstream audiences decide that they want to watch a tragic love story about gay cowboys, and so Brokeback Mountain becomes a major event
-The 40-Year-Old Virgin starts the film career of the Judd Apatow Consortium and the current wave of sweet-raunchy R-rated comedies
-Christopher Nolan asks, "why haven't they made a realistic superhero movie?", proceeds to alter the future of popcorn cinema with Batman Begins

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2005
-The Romanian New Wave is inaugurated with the international success of Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu
-Joe Wright, shockingly, finds something new to say about Pride & Prejudice
-Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To brings his crime thriller Election to Cannes, raising his profile about as high as it will ever go in the West

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: HEAD GAMES

It might not be intentional (though I suspect it probably is), but the British-Irish comedy-drama Frank plays a game of such meta-textural delicacy that the whole movie couldn't really exist if it hadn't succeeded. To wit, we have here a film that acts as hard as it can like an idiotic quirky comedy from the 2000s, playing every stylistic card it can to add a sense of visual whimsy and pushing its lead actor into a heightened, poppy emotional register that suggests a simplistically likable everyboy hero. And then, right about halfway through, when the charm of it has started to wear out and the goofiness is drifting towards shrillness, the bottom falls out, and we're suddenly watching a surprisingly raw depiction of damaged psyches that deal with the scariness of the real world by acting quirky. In effect, the film is using an overplayed genre as a blind to lull us into expecting all the wrong things, and then when the actual content of the movie is sprung on us, it hits all the harder for it, while also caustically indicting all those quirkfests of yore as unfathomably divorced from human experience. Not bad for 95 minutes' work.

The protagonist is Jon Burroughs, played by Domhnall Gleeson with the spirited can-do attitude of a parakeet. He's toiling away trying to write pop songs based on life he witnesses in his greyed-out suburb of Dublin, leaving all his thoughts unfiltered and married to trivial la-la tunes, and one day, by chance, he meets Don (Scoot McNairy), a member of a very eccentric music group passing through town. They need an emergency keyboardist for that very night, and Jon leaps at the chance to play with real musicians, but the set doesn't last for very long: thereminist Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal) breaks her instrument and storms off minutes into the first song. But something about Jon impresses the band's leader, Frank (Michael Fassbender), who invites the young man to join as their permanent keyboardist. Nobody else is terribly happy with this, but what Frank says, goes. Which, incidentally includes the fact that Frank wears an enormous papier-mâché head at all times, and no-one in the band has ever seen his actual face.

Jon's enthusiastic tweeting and YouTubing (annoylingly over-stated with onscreen text - if social media stays an important part of human life, filmmakers are going to have to come up with a more interesting way of dealing with it) about the band's progress over the next 11 months as they toil in the Irish countryside over an album brings them some unexpected prominence, but at the same time, he grows more and more painfully aware that something is not right. Frank's perfectionism leads to endless practicing but no real musical creation, and the interpersonal dynamics within the band are erratic and emotionally broken. All of which is sharpened when Jon's activities bring the band an invitation to America to play in SXSW, and the full depth to which Frank and company aren't actually able to deal with the implications of that start to explode in rather nasty ways.

To clarify one important thing first: while Frank is not the dipshit quirky comedy about magical eccentrics that it looks like, it still has some fairly urgent limitations as a work of cinema. Since the first half of Jon Ronson and Peter Straughan's screneplay is structured as a fake-out that leaves all the thematic and psychological development for the end, it spends a great deal of time revving and very little going anywhere, and Gleeson's bright, smiley performance is frequently the only thing providing much of a shape the proceedings at all. The film clearly things that the situation it's depicting is much weirder and thus more captivating than really turns out to be the case; there's only one joke, and director Lenny Abrahamson's manner of visually staging everything with an eye towards realism doesn't ever let that joke flourish. Fassbender's performance is sweet enough, even with his face hidden, but the rest of the band fade into the background, and Gyllenhaal's featured moments are all reductive and shrewish in a way that benefits neither the character nor the actress.

The film picks up a great deal of steam as it moseys along, and Fassbender's performance gradually deepens and moves from a pleasing embodiment of an indie-film conceit into a surprisingly complex and nervy portrayal of delicate psychology, all using just his body language and voice. Not that those are little things, and his line readings in particular are filled with  layers of feeling and splashes of desperation and fear that are unexpected and alarming and touching all at once. Really, it's just another in a line of great performances from one of the most reliable actors in the world - I doubt very much that anybody would walk out convinced that they'd just seen his new career highlight - but if Gleeson provides the first half of the movie with its spine, Fassbender provides the second half with its insight and humanity, frightening and off-putting though that humanity might sometimes be.

It's still not the case that Frank ever entirely coheres into a unified statement or a clear narrative progression. The ultimate message, that artistic genius is slippery and elusive and maybe not much fun to have or to be around, is a little looser than it should be, and despite how much it grows out of Jon's character arc, the film seems increasingly unsure what to do with him for its last ten minutes or so. It doesn't wrap up so much as it finds a place to coast to a stop. Nobody wants that kind of thing.

Even so, the parts of Frank that work are pretty delightful. The sense of humor is a little forced, but treated with enough deadpan under-emphasis that it manages to be funnier than it maybe ought to be, and Gleeson is a sweet enough lead that his lack of modulation in his set cheeriness throughout the opening acts doesn't damage the film as badly as it might have. And it's always worth watching Fassbender, even just parts of Fassbender. There's enough complexity and thematic insight here that these characters end up feeling more than the sum of their parts even if the film containing them can never quite manage the same feat.

7/10

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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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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: LOVE AND DEATH IN THE WEST BANK

Hany Abu-Assad's Omar feels like the kind of movie that gets nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, which is exactly what happened to it. That's not a criticism, and it's certainly not a compliment, but the film's "type" is clear enough: a political story told through a personal drama, harsh enough in its themes that it feels like an art film, but straightforward enough in its aesthetic and storytelling that it's not hard to watch. All of which also apply to Abu-Assad's Paradise Now, which was also an Oscar nominee, and to which this film feels very much a spiritual sequel and companion piece.

Like that work, Omar is also quite a bit better than I've just made it sound: it's on the simple side, and it's a bit too hand-holding in its political philosophy, but it also tells a hell of of an interesting human story that has been fleshed out with considerable sophistication and insight by its creator and his mostly non-professional cast. At first blush, it feels like a variation on Romeo and Juliet in occupied Palestine: Omar (Adam Bakri) lives in one cordoned-off segment of the city, Nadia (Leem Lubany) lives in another, and he frequently scales the enormous concrete wall dividing them to be with his beloved. He also scales the wall to meet with her brother, Tarek (Iyad Hoorani), and their friend Amjad (Samer Bisharat), the other two-thirds of a very small, very amateur resistance cell that finds the young men plotting acts of violence against the Israeli soldiers who are one of the more unlikable aspects of their daily life. And this proves to be the start of his woes, when the three of them end up responsible for killing an Israeli soldier: Omar is captured by the authorities, who trick him into making a false confession and then using it as leverage to capture Tarek, who they assume to the killer and mastermind, when in fact it was Amjad who pulled the trigger. And Amjad who, while Omar finds himself turned into a paranoid, hunted animal, starts to move in close to Nadia.

Paranoia is the key word there: Omar eventually turns into a political thriller of the "nobody can be trusted" variety, with Omar realising over the course of his adventures that he's managed to stuff himself into a situation where he either gets killed by the Israelis as a terrorist or by the Palestinians as a traitor and spy. The whole film is burdened with that kind of fatalistic feeling: with this movie, Abu-Assad seems less interested in indicting the specifics of the Israeli treatment of the Palestinian populations they control, and thus not so interested in the psychology of terrorism (the theme of Paradise Now). Instead, the focus is on the toll of occupation, the sense of dragging despair of living in a heavily regimented, surveillance-dominated world where the simplest acts of human life are a potentially life-threatening chore, and no number of suicide bombers can budge that situation an inch.

We see this play out on Bakri's face, a mutable canvass for whatever Abu-Assad requires: the actor has the look of a cleanly-scrubbed model, up until he suddenly, shockingly doesn't, an adopts the beleaguered, weathered expression of someone who has suffered too much and run out of hope. The film doesn't hide from the opportunity to depict violence - there are torture scenes here that could be deeply horrifying if the director and cinematographer Ehab Assal didn't cloak them in a gloomy murk - but it's most cutting, disturbing effects aren't so visceral as that. The best and most sobering thing the movie can ever do is show us how emptiness starts to smother out Omar's personality and spark.

It's a smart piece of character-building that sidesteps the problem that limited Paradise Now somewhat: it isn't overly programmatic and over-eager to make sure we follow along every connection it's making. The way it steps out how this affects this affects this does feel a little overly precise and inorganic at times, but there are far more moments where things bubble up organically, just a matter of watching characters sloshing against each other, checking their reactions to see what that might tell us about their place in the world they inhabit. It's a naturalist film through and through, even when it has the plot details of a melodrama, and the unforced acting thrives in that setting.

As a direct extension of that naturalism, it's also, unfortunately a bit stiff and uncreative in the way it employs its camera, and I do wish that Abu-Assad's sense of visual storytelling was a bit more profound than "if you hold for a long time as people do things in a wide shot, it will make the moment feel more lived-in". I mean, that's true, but it's also a bit boring, and there are stretches where Omar feels a bit like a mass-produced European social realist film with only the thin overlay of novelty that it happens to involve Palestinians. There's nothing with that: social realism has a long and noble history in the employ of politically-motivated cinema, and even if Omar doesn't have quite the schematic morality of other films on the Israel-Palestine conflict, it certainly doesn't leave any doubt where the filmmakers stand on the issue. The aesthetic is a good fit for the topic, it simply feels a bit over-familiar, and that's never a great thing for any movie.

Still, familiar or not, Omar gets at some very impressive, discomfiting truths about the desperate life of young people in the West Bank, stripped of their youthful ebullience and forced to scrabble for survival. It never sacrifices story for being a social document, but it frequently manages to be both things simultaneously, and that mixture makes it a fine and moving piece of cinema no matter how little it tries to push the medium forward.

8/10

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DECEMBER 2014 MOVIE PREVIEW

And here we are at the end of a year that began well, middled terrifically, and now... well, it's the most crowedest time of the year, with films being pitched out in the mad hope that they'll have awards glory, or make huge sums of cash over the holidays, or both. And as has been the case from just about the beginning, I've found very little to look forward to in this year's slate of awards hopefuls or wannabe blockbusters. So forgive me if I look at the enormous number of titles coming out in the next thirty days, and on virtually no counts come up with more than a sour "is that all?"


3.12.2014

A limited release to start things off: Wild, in which Reese Witherspoon plays the Emile Hirsch character from Into the Wild, from the director of Dallas Buyers Club, and there is seriously not one single proper noun in the sentence I just wrote that makes this sound even borderline tolerable. If nothing else, the awful bourgeois overtones of the whole "find yourself in nature" shtick should be more satisfying with a woman on the verge of 40 instead of a twentyish man in the lead.


5.12.2014

And now, a wide release, but only by the barest definition: The Pyramid, whose concept gives me the worst flashbacks to As Above, So Below. Oh, December horror. The month is already scary enough without your sad attempts at breaking out.


12.12.2014

Amazing to think that directors Ridley Scott and Chris Rock could be facing off and the latter would appear to have, by far, the better film coming out (also that the phrase "director Chris Rock" could be casually dropped like that). Between Rock's character-driven comedy Top Five, with its rapturous reviews, and Scott's new attempt at a big-ass ancient world epic, Exodus: Gods and Kings, it's easy for me to say which one looks more appealing. Especially since the "Bible story as CG adventure" slot for the year was already filled by Noah, which seems to be coming from a more artistically rigorous place than this.

Limited: Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice, and given that I'm already pretty lukewarm on his filmography, the thought of having to deal with a PTA picture getting mixed reviews is not a pretty thought, not at all.


17.12.2014

Just like that, only 800 hours after it started, Peter Jackson brings his adaptation of the slender children's book The Hobbit to a close with The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. Why not, I saw the first two.


19.12.2014

Just from the trailers, the metallic autotune and shrieking caricature of humanity played by Cameron Diaz were enough to make the new modern-dress version of Annie look more like punishment than entertainment, and now word comes from those what have pirated the film in the wake of what Sony badly wants to pretend is an attack by North Korea that no, it's actually worse than it looks. Sadly, word is not out yet on whether or not Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb is any worse than it looks, but I do appreciate that the race for the year's worst theatrically-released family film is coming down to the wire like this.

Meanwhile, Mike Leigh's latest, Mr. Turner, comes out, and look well, because it is the only thing coming out between now and Christmas that I'm actually looking forward to in any significant way.


24.12.2014

What says Christmas Eve like a woman desperately fighting to save her job? Nothing at all, says the Belgian Two Days, One Night, which I have already seen and loved. But a long, emotionally rough biopic of 18th Century writers is festive too, argues the German Beloved Sisters, which I've seen and liked.


25.12.2014

Six big new movies, though luckily, you only have to pick between three of them if you live anywhere but New York and Los Angeles. There's the big heaving sincerity of the obvious Oscar play Unbroken, or the smutty bro comedy of The Interview; I imagine both will be fine exemplars of genres I don't like, but the Brayton family movie for Christmas Day will likely be Into the Woods for reasons of Sondheim loyalty. And also a trailer that gives me a hope-like substance? Even though Rob Marshall is responsible? And then I remember that Chicago, which I didn't care for much at all, had a killer trailer, and I get depressed.

The little releases include Selma, which ought to be the break-out film for Ava DuVernay, and how great will it be to have a black female director in the awards season mix? Also Big Eyes, the most un-Tim Burtony looking Tim Burton movie in decades, and American Sniper, a Clint Eastwood picture that will be getting favorable reviews simply by virtue of not being Jersey Boys. I love the thought that there will be families arguing about whether to watch the movie about the prolific killer or the movie about the political protests after their Christmas dinner.


31.12.2014

In under the wire for awards consideration, a pair of films by directors I'm predisposed to like: it will be perhaps weeks later that I finally see Andrey Zvyagintsev's Leviathan or J.C. Chandor's A Most Violent Year, but oh how I anticipate both: my favorite Russian filmmaker alive on the one hand, a great director of actors working with Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac on the other. Not a bad way to wrap up a year.

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