HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2008: In which cinema inters a recently-finished television staple

The question has been nagging at me for some weeks: six years later, is there any sort of value to be had in another white male critic lambasting the first Sex and the City movie? The good news, then, is that I'm not entirely inclined to do that. Not all of it, anyway. The trick, I find, is to muscle through the utterly foul first hour to get at all the stuff that's actually kind of smart, sensitive to its characters, and at least slightly willing to interrogate the franchise's status to non-fans as the thing that sold a grim late-capitalist hallucination of rampant consumerism in a bluntly fictive version of New York. The other trick is to have one's first real engagement with that franchise having been the rather vile 2010 feature Sex and the City 2, compared to which just about anything would seem measured and intelligent.

Set three years after the conclusion of the 6-season HBO Zeitgeist hit of the same name, Sex and the City tells of the travails that happen to four beloved archetypes of all women who live privileged lives in a white urban enclave, after they think they've all found their happily ever after. Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), the narcissist with abysmal taste in expensive clothes (first thing in the movie: Carrie walking by a gaggle of teens who are all in awe of her dress, dominated by a hideous fucking crepe flower the size of a dinner plate that's perched on her right shoulder like a badly conjoined head), is just about to move in her hunky millionaire boyfriend John James Preston AKA "Mr. Big" (Chris Noth); brittle, feelingless lawyer Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) is barely tolerating life in Brooklyn with her husband Steve (David Eigenberg) and son Brady (Joseph Pupo); mousy doormat Charlotte (Kristin Davis) is so happily married to Harry (Evan Handler) and so happy to have just adopted a daughter, that the film can't even come up with a decent plotline for her. Samantha Jones (Kim Catrall), the voracious sex addict and generally awesome deliverer of filthy quips and the only one of the four who doesn't threaten to plunge me into a rage of woman-hating Marxism, is living in Los Angeles with Smith Jerrod (Jason Lewis), and starting to feel sad about all the sex she's not having. They're all four about to be pressed back together as close as close can be, thanks to Carrie's out-of-character impending nuptials to Big; so out-of-character, in fact, that he starts to panic, and she freaks out, and they split up, and this triggers a range of difficulties in all their lives.

Eventually, that happens, anyways. First, we have the wedding planning, and it is horrible, rancid, consumer porn bullshit. I tried to prepare myself: I tried to figure out what, besides gender, makes something like James Bond "okay" and Sex in the City "not okay", and was all prepared to grapple with that question, but really, fuck it. Sex and the City's depiction of attaining things is unholy, particularly with the film coming out right at the tipping point of the world economy into disarray, and the lifestyle of Carrie & company turned into something not just distasteful, but actively repellent. For very long stretches, it doesn't seem as though the film is able to communicate any other thought than "buying things makes you happier and better"; no matter how many anonymous brown people James Bond guns down, it doesn't offend my sense of basic decency nearly as much.

But after an hour of this, something magical happens: it all just sort of melts away, and in its second hour, Sex and the City turns into a comfortable, lived-in depiction of four female friends who know each other well trying to help everybody else keep it together during a series of emotional crises. This is not without its swerves into idiotic comedy: it is based on a sitcom, and there's a consistent regression towards that mean in the way the script by director Michael Patrick King (a regular contributor to the series as both writer and director) builds its jokes and steps through all of its character arcs according to nice, neat principles of episodic dramaturgy. It is not possible, that is to say, to mistake Sex and the City for elegant cinematic storytelling: even setting aside that the first two-fifths of its running time is given over to godawful non-drama (and setting aside, also, the fact that it's two and a half fucking hours long, with enough content to stretch itself out to 90 minutes). It has lumps, and it has painfully obvious punchlines, and it has an almost comically misjudged sense of pacing, with a moment at the 110 minute mark that clearly seems to be cuing up the last spate of reconciliations until- nope! let's grind another half-hour out of this sucker.

What it also has, though, are four actors who are not all equally gifted, to be nice about it, but whose comfort level in the skin of their characters is enough that even with my unfamiliarity towards the series (and hostility to the little bit I knew of it), the warmth of the relationships between the four women feels alive and real and quite inveigling. It's downright pleasant to watch them interact with and support each other, even though, by all logical rights, it doesn't really make sense that Charlotte would want to hang around these people, and it makes even less sense that anybody in the whole world would want to hang around Miranda.

The film's human-level coziness clearly marks it out as a simple bit of fan-pandering, but done with enough affection towards those fans that it's not impenetrably insular. Mind you, this coziness doesn't gel at all well with the film's need to be cinematic: it has an acute awareness that justifying the leap from the little screen to the big screen requires a kind of Event! sized storytelling to match (in which respect it certainly bests the stubbornly low stakes of The X-Files: I Want to Believe, from later in the same summer), and that Event! focus is the source of many of the film's problems. It keeps interrupting the characters for enormous drama, life-changing stakes, and so on, all of it feeling bloated and unnecessary, and all of it should with stiff ineffectivness by King and cinematographer John Thomas, another veteran of the show, who between them have very little sense of how to do anything with the visuals but make them look large and flat.

In short: the film's strengths are those of television, not of film; it doesn't look like a film; and yet here it is, a film. The odd impulse to make things into movies that are perfectly well-suited to television neither started nor ended here, of course (did we not just find ourselves examining The Simpsons Movie?), and at least Sex and the City tries to go big. It simply doesn't succeed. Intimacy is the right fit for this material, and when it allows itself to be intimate, it's charming in its way; it would, undoubtedly, have been better for this never to have pretended it was a movie at all. But that is not the thinking of Hollywood accounting, which prefers above all and especially in the 21st Century, to use established brands to make money off of established fanbases. And if there's one thing that Sex and the City can teach us, it's the almighty importance of brand names.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2008
-Pixar's WALL·E makes the fate of a dirty robot the stuff of the greatest soul-stirring drama
-Iron Man and The Dark Knight create the only two flavors that future superhero movies will ever come in for the rest of time
-Sensitive indie poet of natural spaces David Gordon Green reinvents himself as a bro-com auteur with the pot epic Pineapple Express

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2008
-The unbelievably bleak and distressing British/Irish political drama Hunger makes director Steve McQueen and star Michael Fassbender into major artists overnight
-Pascal Laugier's Martyrs instantly becomes one of the most talked-about examples of the French extreme horror scene
-Israeli director Ari Folman produces the unclassifiable animated docu-biography Waltz with Bashir

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WHEN IDIOTS WERE IN EGYPT'S LAND

If there's anything that could imaginably help The Pyramid to stand out in the cramped world of low-budget horror (spoiler alert: there is not), it would be the surprising way that the film confounds the expectations of first-person camera filmmaking. The film equips itself with a grand total of three POV machines - one documentary cameraman, one badass archaeology chick with a little head camera, and one Mars rover on loan from NASA - which already sets us up with plenty of reasonably decent excuses to cut around locations like a proper movie, but that's apparently not sufficient for director Grégory Levasseur (Alexandre Aja's longtime screenwriter making his directorial debut; Aja is on-hand to produce). Frequently, the film abandons those perspectives entirely, for a new position not merely where the characters aren't, but where they can't be: on at least two occasions, the camera sets up shop on the inside of a room that the characters are about to enter, a room that is specifically defined as being a place that humans have not set foot in a bajillionty-hundred years.

On the one hand, I admire Levasseur's decision; it allows him access to the one dubious strength of the first-person style (we more closely identify with the characters in the moment of a jump scare) without having to shackle himself to its many, many limitations of cheap-looking footage and tortured justifications for including any kind of camera in every single scene. But then, having given itself room to actually do something with the form, The Pyramid doubles-down, hard, on the found-footage conceit that has increasingly been silently abandoned by first-person movies: the very first thing that we see are title card explaining with documentary crispness that what we're about to watch is the record of what happened outside of Cairo on such and such a date in 2013. Those with a keen sense of recent history will thus be able to guess what the second thing that we see turns out to be: smoke billowing out of Cairo and masses of political protesters, whose actions sit way deep in the background of the movie's plot, crassly setting up a ticking clock that feebly drives the action as the first act shades into the second. Is it the most tasteless insertion of tremendously significant real-life events into a junk drawer horror picture in all of history? No, certainly not. But might very well be the most tasteless of such gestures in 2014, particularly when we take the time to note that of the six primary characters, the two specifically defined as being ethnically Egyptian are also the first two to die.

Anyway, this conceptually unsound depiction of what happened on that fateful day initially takes the form of footage being shot by "Fitzie" (James Buckley), of bold, adventurous Sunni (Christa Nicola), who is by all accounts a documentary filmmaker, though we absolutely never see her perform any action that suggests that she's not a second-string news reporter. They're there to capture the exciting new discovery made by father-daughter archaeologist team Holden (Denis O'Hare) and Nora (Ashley Hinshaw), he a fusty old traditionalist, she a tech-savvy progressive, whose work with satellites (we see one such satellite, from a perspective somewhere in outer space; so much for found footage) has uncovered an unknown pyramid beneath the Egyptian desert. And not just any pyramid; a three-sided pyramid! Or as we call them in the real world, a tetrahedron, but superstar high-tech archeologists don't have time for no ten-cent words.

Just after determining that the pyramid has some kind of horrible toxic dust polluting its air, but before sending their Mars rover "Shorty", operated by hunky engineer Michael (Amir K), into its dark depths, the team is interrupted by word that the government has pulled all archeological permits until the protests have died down. Under the shouty eye of Corporal Shadid (Faycal Attougui), the team packs up, but Nora manages to convince everybody to just send Shorty in for a few minutes. And having done so, it gets attacked by some barely seen rat-cat hybrid hellbeast. That should be that, but Michael starts to panic about the shit that will be rained down upon him if he doesn't retrieve the rover, and so do all five of our heroes end up trucking on into the pyramid, where they discover many spooky engravings, some more of the hellbeast, and an even bigger, nastier hellbeast to boot, all while piecing together enough evidence to prove Egyptian cosmology, a development that doesn't seem to seriously concern anybody, including writers Daniel Meersand & Nick Simon.

The best thing that could have happened to The Pyramid was opening just a handful of months after the largely similar (first person, underground, end up stumbling into the actual physical place where the afterlife is located) As Above, So Below, which remains one of the most infuriatingly shitty horror films I've seen in the 2010s. The Pyramid is merely bad: not doing anything acutely wrong, just sort of lying there limp,clumsily mixing its visual metaphors while relying on some hilariously bad dialogue to keep the movie on its rickety rails. Most of this falls to poor Holden, whose nearly every line functions less as "I'm saying something that I, as a person, think" than, "I'm saying something that I, as a cog in this barely-functioning machine, need to express in order to make things unnecessarily clear to the audience". Not just mythology things. Backstory between him and his daughter things, of a sort that does not matter. Like the bit where he nastily talks down her interest in extra-terrestrial life. Would you suppose that means that aliens will end up having anything to do with the rest of the movie, or at least that Nora's susceptibility to paranormal musings will come into play? You would, in that case, suppose wrong.

The one thing that The Pyramid does manage to do is set up a reliable drip of jump scares, insofar as that makes the world a better place. It also has modestly effective monster design: the more we see of the big bad boss monster, the more it looks like low-budget CGI gone amok, but the catbeasts are effectively creepy, looking just enough like real animals (kind of like if you threw some Sphynx cats into glowing green sludge) that they seem like actual perversions and not the work of an overindulged effects designer. One particular shot, with their little eyes glowing red as they chase the characters, is legitimately atmospheric and spooky in all the best ways.

So that's one 10-second shot out of 89 minutes; not the worst batting average for a horror film of this ilk. There's plenty about The Pyramid that's tedious, from its characters who are far too stupid in far too many ways to remotely convince us that they actually practice their established professions, to its jerry-rigged and clichéd escalation of tension (that is to say, it's "escalation" of "tension"), but... no, actually, it's just tedious.

3/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: HEY, JOE

Joe is the most rewarding film directed by David Gordon Green in years, and it's also the film that leads me to suppose that there's probably no real hope of him ever returning to the exemplary heights of his early career. It is a clear improvement on and refinement of the concerns of Prince Avalanche, the film immediately preceding it in his filmography, but it's also entrenching him in a frankly less ambitious vein of work than he first made his name with. At heart, Joe is a gloomy piece of realist cinema with a bit more regional flair than normal, and it is awfully good at being that. But the sense of poetry and the uncanny knowledge of place that made George Washington one of the very best debut features of the last 15 years is totally absent. Anyone could have made Joe, though in fairness, not all that many people could have made it as well as Green has.

Filmed in the same desolate stretches of Texas as Prince Avalanche, the film tells of the relationship that grows between Joe (Nicolas Cage), an ex-convict working with a crew to clean out commercially undesirable trees to built a pine farm, and Gary (Tye Sheridan), a teenager with an alcoholic father, Wade (Gary Poulter) and a desperate need for guidance and wisdom, even from as dubious a source as Joe. Not, by any conceivable stretch of the imagination, an unusual pair of figures for a character study to focus on (it's the second film in Sheridan's brief career to touch on that dynamic, after Mud) though Joe shakes loose from convention in enough ways to feel more inspired than redundant. Gary Hawkins's script is unusually alive to the economic and social conditions of rural Americans, to begin with, and Green's direction of that script draws constant focus to the mud and decrepitude and general sense of things being ancient and shitty that dominate the locations in which the story unfolds. That is, Joe works not because of the story it tells as such, but because of the way it draws that story up from an enfolding context. Joe and Gary are symptomatic of the exhausted state of poor rural whites as much as they are characters in their own right, and for building itself around a culture rather than around a fairly generic coming-of-age scenario, Joe certainly deserves our attention and respect.

That being the case, this strength also rather inevitably leads to the film's biggest liability, which is its uniformity of tone. And not just any tone, either, but the most oppressive one the filmmakers can whip up. I'm irresistibly reminded of Winter's Bone, the biggest recent example of the "savage life of the economically ravaged hinterlands of the American South and associated areas" genre, a film that is in many ways great, but ultimately doubles-down so hard on its depiction of suffering and anguish that it ends up feeling like misery porn with an artistic flourish. Joe isn't nearly so dark as that (though it's also not as probing), but its non-stop town of suffocating lack and human limitations - shored up even more by the bleak and angry score composed by Jeff McIlwain and David Wingo - ends up feeling more punishing than illuminating, and before the film ends, it's become unclear if all this harshness is driven by realism, or if it's just trying to make the audience feel bad and the punish the characters.

What saves it - much as it saved Winter's Bone, come to think of it - is the high quality of the acting. Virtually the entire cast was made up of local non-professionals, which leads to some awkward line readings from performers clearly uncomfortable with the proximity of the camera, but at least in the case of Poulter - a dysfunctional drunk playing a dysfunctional drunk, who died shortly after the film's premiere at the 2013 Venice Film Festival - the neorealist casting gambit paid off hugely, with a character whose broken, even loathsome behavior is so helplessly natural that when his put-upon, abused son smirks indulgently, it's not difficult to understand what drives that kind of surprisingly generous response.

Mostly, though, the film is dominated by its two professionals, Cage and Sheridan, both of them excellent. Sheridan is, in truth, playing a bit too close to his Mud performance, but with enough wiry adolescent fury and confusion informing his actions that it's almost as impressive as revelatory work was there. But the real revelations come from Cage, in his most controlled piece of screen acting in years: the most recent film that can even begin to compare was his manic turn for Werner Herzog in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans, but if somebody tried to sell me on the notion that his last work at this level was in Adaptation. way the hell back in 2002, I wouldn't fight them. A lot of the performance's success comes from context: we know Cage is capable of weird explosions, and when we see Joe working hard to keep himself leveled out and calm in his dealings with a world that arbitrarily beats up on him, it's easy to see the insane, hammy Cage twitching away just under the skin of this subdued, glowering Cage. But it's also less meta than that: Cage brings a wonderful burly authority and wasted sadness to the character, fleshing out depths already present in the script and insisting on the character's domestic tragedy in ways that maybe weren't so present.

Those two actors are the best insurance the film has against becoming pointlessly depressing; them, and the characteristically on-point cinematographer Tim Orr, capturing the filth and ugliness of the setting with a fascination for textures and patterns of light rather than exploiting it for maximum redneck-baiting, and contrasting this with the calming, dappled beauty of forests that blend the roughness of indie realism with the respectfully spiritual Malickisms that Green himself seems to have largely abandoned. The film looks great, but more important, that look is designed to intensify the presence and authenticity of the film rather than just show off.

All this results in a film that is strong and moving, though never quite as much as it feels like it could be; and its insights are all ultimately a little pat. The overall sense of the movie isn't entirely one of being stunned with discovery, but of reconfirming things we already knew, from Green's earlier films, from the films that took their cues from those films, and so on. If the director only ever makes films exactly this good, it will be an admirable career he has left in front of him, but not one that feels like it's pushing all that hard against a tradition of grubby American indie filmmaking that does feel like it's just about played itself out.

7/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2007: In which cinema rejuvenates a long-exhausted television staple

Conventional wisdom holds that the eighth season of the undying television juggernaut The Simpsons was the last that regularly hit the highest peaks that the series was capable of summiting. And while I don't know that conventional wisdom has necessarily decided which season exactly was the last one where the show was still predominately good, the eleventh seems to be a widely agreed-upon cut-off point. The eight season ended in 1997, the eleventh in 2000, and it wasn't until the summer of 2007 that The Simpsons Movie finally sashayed its way into theaters, by which point the 18-season-old show had fallen into the status of that thing fans watched out of habit and momentum rather than any sort of pleasure. The promise of a feature-length theatrical release based on the series had gone from being generally thought of with enthusiasm, to generally dreaded, to generally looked on with yawning disinterest. And then along came 20th Century Fox's crackerjack marketing team to blast away with nostalgic appeals and The Event You've Been Waiting for trumpets, and sure enough, almost a decade after its sell-by date, The Simpsons Movie turned into a for-real cultural event.

It helped that the feature was at a generally higher level of quality than the bulk of the episodes in the seasons immediately preceding it. There are, sure, the expected stretch marks and wobbly decisions that proudly declare the writers - all eleven of them! - veterans of 22-minute stories rather than even such a brief feature as the 87 minutes of The Simpsons Movie. Like most great television comedy, one of the strengths of the show is a fleet pace, pushing everything through quickly enough that its surrealist excesses can fly by without being distractions, and so that the rhythm of gags never lets up. The Simpsons Movie cannot claim that as a gag: its plot is not meaningfully more complicated or bigger in scale than a TV show could handle in a single bite, and the two main threads of the story basically repeat plots that had been featured on the parent series, many times already.

Still, the relatively leisurely pace that the narrative operates under in its stretched-out form has its own compensations. The whole thing feels a bit more lived-in and comfortable, to begin with; and while I have no idea what sort of reception the film has had among fans vs. non-fans of the show (or even if, throughout its life, it has been seen by enough non-fans for that to represent a meaningful audience segment - for the record, I consider myself someone who enjoys golden age Simpsons just fine when it's playing in front of me, and who has seen an enormous number of episodes from the first 14 seasons, but doesn't meet the definition of a "fan"), but it strikes me that this probably makes The Simpsons Movie a bit friendlier to a newbie than any random episode from that era might: it slows down to study the character relationships more and is more fully "about" its domestic drama than a single episode of television gets to be on its own. Moreover, having a slacker pace is at least partially to credit for the obvious superiority of the movie to the television episodes produced around the same time: it gets to stretch and relax a bit more, and not have to be so manic and unflagging, and that leaves to a great deal less forced zaniness. If that cuts back on the comic inventiveness, or sense of fearlessness... well, it does cut back on those things. But the film is still funny, if slightly too gentle (the attempts at political satire, for one, fall completely flat). And while the jokes are, for the most part, akin to the kind that show up on the TV series (absurdist one-offs, or examples of the characters being themselves), the enlarged palette allows room for a bit more interleaving and call-backs than the series ever tended to rely on in quite the same way. And there's a bit more crudeness: an inspired nudity gag in the early going that plays with and then against expectations with beautiful timing, a wee bit harder language than family-hour television gets to exploit, but nothing that seriously stretches the boundaries of PG-13.

Mostly, though, the extended running time doesn't show up in any kind of expanded ambition. This is still animated sitcom humor based around the well-established natures of characters that the terrific voice cast (Matt Groenig's shows have always been kind to traditional voice actors) is as comfortable with as a second skin, and the happenings are pitched at the level they had been pitched at for eighteen years. Fat incompetent Homer Simpson (Dan Castellaneta) still manages to do tremendously stupid things that earns him the enmity of the whole town of Springfield and threatens his marriage to Marge (Julie Kavner); their son Bart (Nancy Cartwright) still has unexpressed pain that flashes out as antisocial JD behavior. Daughter Lisa (Yeardley Smith), easily the most ill-served of the Simpson family in the film, still passionately chases down progressive causes that nobody around her gives a shit about. The specifics hardly matter; it's not the first "the town is almost destroyed" plot in the franchise canon, nor the last, and not even the first time that Albert Brooks played a smooth-talking villain. It's just that it all takes a little bit longer to play out.

With the jokes mostly purring around smoothly, and the cast taking care of itself - though it's a bit surprising that the well-stocked universe of Simpsons side characters aren't more present - the only thing that really overtly sets The Simpsons Movie apartment from its parent is the greater scope and ambition of its visuals. Oh, how much the animators, both in the United States and South Korea, thrive on the expanded budget and screen! It's not a particularly great work of animation - especially with Pixar's exquisite Ratatouille having opened less than one month earlier - but in the innumerable computer-aided pans and tilts and craning shots through busy crowd scenes, the whole film buzzes with an obvious sense of freedom to do bigger and more sprawling things than a TV show, with a TV budget and a TV production schedule, could daydream about. The colors and shading are richer, the effects are more detailed. It is certainly the most beautiful-looking piece of work in Simpsons history, though not also the most eager to explore the extreme possibilities of animation.

At any rate, it works as a solid comedy and an effective piece of fanservice that doesn't bog itself down too much to alienate a more general audience. One would hope, perhaps, that the filmmaking team would have a bigger idea for making the jump from television to the enlarged palette of cinema than "why not?", and even at its best, The Simpsons Movie never quite manages to argue that it has grander concerns than making some money off its brand name (it even guiltily admits something like this in an opening meta-joke about paying for something you can see at home for free), though even just seven years ago, the American film industry wasn't as suffocatingly besotted with brand recognition as it is now. Anyway, even if the film hardly exploits its new medium, working without commercial breaks and time limits freed up the creative team to make something lighter, fresher, and more affectionate towards the characters than they'd been for a long time. Given how obviously financial concerns weighed in the film's instigation and production, the fact that you can feel some kind of inspiration wafting of the screen is a legitimate, even unexpected triumph.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2007
-The jagged editing and frenzied camerawork in The Bourne Ultimatum uncontroversially delights everyone, leading to a new action movie aesthetic that remains fresh and appealing years later
-Diablo Cody invents a new English-adjacent language for the snappy teen comedy Juno
-In There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis drinks Paul Dano's milkshake

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2007
-Roy Andersson's You, the Living reaches new heights of deadpan Scandinavian black comedy
-Hou Hsiao-Hsien travels to France and gives Juliette Binoche one of her best roles ever in Flight of the Red Balloon
-Guy Maddin turns his hometown into a blur of frozen horses and surreal soap operas with My Winnipeg

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NOW MUSEUM, NOW YOU DON'T

Last year's superlative At Berkeley dropped me squarely into the "Frederick Wiseman, where have you been all my life?" phase of my cinephilia, and now National Gallery confirms it: this man's documentaries are magnificent, essential, pure cinema. You can draw a line straight back from National Gallery's patient and inflectionless shots of people standing in the rooms of the titular museum all the way back to Auguste and Louis Lumière's objective viewpoint of Parisian crowds, and yet National Gallery feels profoundly modern in every way. It has as much to say about life and culture in the 2010s as any other movie I've seen all year, while being just a hell of a lot of fun to watch for its deep access to the inner workings of a living institution that most of us won't have had a chance to see. At Berkeley is probably "better" with its epic scale and monumental nature, but National Gallery, with far more editing that has shaped it to offer more of a clear progression of arguments, is rather more enjoyable, if I say so myself.

The subject, of course, is London's National Gallery, which Wiseman (doubling down as sound recordist, on top of directing and editing) visited in 2011 and 2012, during its exhibition of the works of Leonardo Da Vinci (this means, please note, that Wiseman was cutting At Berkeley and National Gallery more or less in tandem, which makes the fact that they're both amazing even more dumbfounding). But it is not a documentary about Leonardo's work. Nor, really, about any of the important works in the National Gallery collection, though many pieces are thoroughly discussed and analysed by onscreen experts over the course of the film's three hours.

What it is about, instead, is how art is curated and sold to people in the buzzy world of the 2010s. There's only a small amount of screentime devoted to the Gallery's bureaucracy, but the longest such scene comes very near the beginning, with a meeting of administrators discussing with polite British acrimony whether it makes sense for the Gallery to associate itself with a charity event, thereby setting A Precedent (which, even the most pro-charity people agree, is a thing that must absolutely not be set). The argument for it is that in a world with an ever-increasing number of diversions, people need a reason to care about the United Kingdom's publicly-owned collection of some of the most important European paintings gathered under one roof, with its attendant veneer of boring conservative respectability.

That's a conversation that never stops echoing throughout the remainder of the film, which becomes, in great part, a study of the way that art experts try to package and explain art. We see lecturers explaining to crowds of tourists how to view art through a modern lens and through a suitably contextualised historical one. We see the fussy, protracted work of tweaking lights to show off the right aspects of a painting. We see the scientific process of restoring damaged paintings and hear an extensive artistic description of what aesthetic philosophy the scientist needs to adopt in order to attempt that restoration. In a cheeky moment that reveals Wiseman has quite the dry sense of humor, we see another documentary team filming the same collection, though with an authoritative narrator who insists on interpretations, as opposed to Wiseman's ultra-detached willingness to stand back and let whoever happens to be in front of the camera do their thing.

Even that's the shallow end of the rabbit hole. For the longer we spend with the historians, lecturers, and administrators explaining within themselves and to outsiders how best to curate collections and then explain to an audience what the importance of all this art is, the more it becomes apparent that Wiseman has basically done the same thing. Taking a pile of God knows how much footage, deciding what story to tell with it, and then cutting it down to a streamlined three hours (which, by virtue of the variety and brevity of scenes, is absolutely never boring), in which we see plenty of explanations to an audience on both sides of the screen of why this art is important. The construction of Wiseman's National Gallery is very much like the construction of the actual edifice which shares its name, a link that the movie fully embraces, insomuch as the hands-off technique that defines the film "embraces" much of anything.

The film ends up being less an argument that classical art does or should still speak to us plugged-in moderns, and more an examination of the multifaceted ways in which it can engage everyone from children to students to art world professionals, and even a group of blind people, in one startling and beautiful scene showcasing just how flexible we can be in our approach to teaching and enjoying art. It's never didactic or politicised, and let's be thankful for that: instead, it simply leads by example, making every new topic it turns its camera to seem fascinating and complex and tremendously exciting, whether it's as revelatory as watching a restorer strip away a thick veneer of aged varnish right before our eyes, or as minute as watching a discussion of where to put the ropes in an exhibition space to correctly guide the viewer's eye and feet. Along the way, a host of interpretive models are forwarded, from the arch-democracy of "I think this one looks like she's texting!" of a centuries-old painting, to the heavily proscribed philosophy that we can only really judge a painting if we see it in the exact room that it was designed for.

It's all the more fascinating because Wiseman simply presents it to us as a flow of ideas and moments and images that present fine art as both timeless and very current, abstractions of light, shape, and mood that are also physical objects which react to the ravages of time and the specifics of their environment in any number of ways. National Gallery finds angles to view these paintings and their presentation as a ongoing process, a job, and an end result, and in all these modes argues silently but persuasively that paying any kind of attention to our combined cultural legacy is the most important thing, not getting it "right" or being sufficiently respectful and stuffy about it. It is, simply, a great film about what art is, with the justified pride to include itself under that umbrella. As it should, for this is easily one of the best films of 2014.

9/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2006: In which family audiences will damn well take what the studios give them and like it

The history of classical Hollywood film style, based in a characteristic form of continuity editing that dates back to the early 1920s, tells the story of making things easier and safer. This is the dominant theme that courses through every study of box office trends, every memoir of a director or actor's career, every aesthetic survey. Outside of a burble in the late 1960s and much of the 1970s, there is a direct connection that can be made, with the American film industry wanting to make money by giving American (and later, international) audiences exactly what they claimed to want in the most unchallenging form that could be devised. It is a national cinema based upon ease of use - sometimes producing great art, sometimes great entertainment, frequently just satisfactory and bland product that does nothing but fill up 90 or 120 minutes. Take away nothing else from all I have written, but at least take that.

I mention this now because with 2006's Night at the Museum, we arrive at something like the perfect embodiment of that ethos. It is a film that can be perfectly and wholly described with the word "harmless", which is a kind of victory. This film's own three-years-later sequel, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, cannot claim to rise to such heights, with its fetid anti-history and trivial jokes that diminish the humanity of the characters within the movie and the audience watching alike. No, there is something that's actually quite perfect about Night at the Museum, which meets its goals with clean, elegant precision. "Being a worthwhile movie that is in any way memorable" simply isn't one of those goals.

Let us not start with the plot, but the plot hook, for that is exactly what the movie (adapted by Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Grant from Milan Trenc's 1993 picture book) does itself. Ben Stiller is the night watchman at the New York Museum of Natural History, where every night all of the exhibits come alive through Egyptian magic. Look at Ben Stiller running from a T-Rex skeleton barreling through the halls! Look at him taking life lessons from President Theodore Roosevelt, played in a remarkably calmed-down register by Robin Williams! Look at him fight with a naughty monkey! Look at him patiently endure the ineffectual weaponry of an inch-tall cowboy played by Owen Wilson and an inch-tall centurion played by Steve Coogan!* And other equally fantastic concepts that nudge us in the ribs and ask "wouldn't that be cool?" as urgently as they possibly can.

And I suppose it is, at that - it's the kind of stuff that bookish 8-year-olds eat up (full disclosure: I was a bookish 8-year-old, but that was over two decades before I first saw the movie), which is probably why Night at the Museum made a startlingly large pile of money for such a ditsy little lark (it was the second-highest grossing film of the year in America, though it was a soft year at the box-office). The seams are showing now, with some compositing that looks pretty ratty (any shot where the Wilson & Coogan characters share the screen with Stiller feels like shitty midcentury rear-projection), and erratic CGI (anything non-organic - dinosaur bones, statues - looks fine, but the animals are all dreadful, and I have to imagine that was obviously true even in 2006). And these do serve to knock a little pixie dust off the magic, which hurts the film overall, since that magic is the one and only card Night at the Museum has up its sleeve.

Certainly, its disinterest in the story it uses to stitch together all of the effects is palpable. It's part of the weird subgenre of movies about the difficulties of parent-child relationships after a divorce, aimed at children but with all of the film's emotional attention paid to the dad's feelings about the whole thing (the genre's most famous entry, Mrs. Doubtfire, also starred Williams and was directed by NatM producer Chris Columbus). A sociologist might have a field day with unpacking what the hell is going on there (male film executives with guilty feelings about their failures as parents, trying to make propaganda to convince their children to love them?), but I'm going to stick with pointing out how weird it is to expect those same bookish 8-year-olds to empathise with Larry Daley's (Stiller) angst over seeing his son Nick (Jake Cherry) starting to drift closer to his mom's (Kim Raver) new husband (Paul Rudd, only about a year away from being able to reject such thankless, unfunny small roles). Or to nod in sorrowful agreement at his difficulties finding a job which can sustain him in a decent-sized New York apartment despite a spotty employment record. In the real world, I doubt very much that job would actually turn out to be night watchman at an underperforming museum, but this is a fantasy.

So anyway, Larry is given a very useless introduction by the old guards - twinkly Cecil (Dick Van Dyke), surly Gus (Mickey Rooney), and soulful Reginald (Bill Cobbs) - and thrown into the lion's den, which turns out to be literal, trigger the part of the of the movie that drops all the plots and focuses on the gentle comic mania of Larry dealing with the museum's many wacky, uncontrollable denizens. When the plot wanders back in from its cigarette break, it has completely changed its character to become a random and insufficient "stop the crooks!" bit that the film cares about so little that it doesn't even bother to resolve it, leaving the wrapping up its wholly inauthentic conflict to a mid-credits stinger that doesn't fit with continuity anyway. The family drama, at least, fits a bit more organically into the whole thing, with Larry and Nicky re-bonding over their adventures stopping the bad guys. Bet you didn't see that coming.

But really, the narrative of Night at the Museum is blobby and incoherently paced; it has no meaningful structure until the second half begins. It really is just an excuse watch Stiller interact with CGI and celebrity cameos, and the script is just there to give it some kind of pretext and emotional stakes that are only present about 40% of the time. All of this is shaped by director Shawn Levy into a carefully anodyne collection of slapstick gags interspersed with silly scenes of broad characters talking. Which is actually enough to make this, arguably, Shawn Levy's all-time best movie: his work is usually aggressively stupid and loud and insulting to human dignity, but Night at the Museum actually turns out to be simply bland and impersonal in the way it cleanly builds up its gags using a very clear set of visual cues (like the T-Rex coming to life sequence, in which every shot telegraphs the next one with dogged strictness of purpose that's such a perfect example of playing by the rules and not injecting a whisper of imagination into the proceedings that I'm actually kind of impressed by it), and the slow-downs and leading close-ups that tell us when to feel feelings and what those feelings out to be.

The film is safe and airbrushed in every regard - even the concept for opening credits, the "floating words over New York" trick that had been greeted with such acclaim just four years earlier in Panic Room, is repeated with all the thematic resonance taken out: now it's just a shiny toy among many shiny toys. It takes invisible little pauses to stop and do a little bit teaching about many of its subjects - the Roman Empire, Sacajawea (Mizuo Peck), the Hun empire - to make it even safer, since it's not just a vague, pleasantly forgettable fantasy that can be easily napped through while the kids are hopefully enjoying it: it's vague, pleasantly forgettable, and educational. And its success did spike admissions at natural history museums, which is the one absolutely unambiguous good to have come out of the whole production.

All in all, then, a perfect example of what the studio system has always wanted: they spend money, you spend money, they get more money from you than they spent, you don't feel like you just had somebody piss in your face. Even though pissing puts in a regrettable appearance to help the film meet its scatology quotient. Nowhere in all that contract is there a requirement that the studios do anything inspired or that you end up feeling meaningfully entertained. And so we end up with the platonic perfection of Night at the Museum, an effects-driven exploration of endless fantasy that ends up being one of the most neutrally adequate blockbusters of the modern age.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2006
-Pixar proves itself mortal with the fine but unexceptional Cars
-John Cameron Mitchell brings explicit sex, a staple of European cinema, to the States with Shortbus
-David Lynch endeavors to straight-up murder cinema with his video experiment Inland Empire

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2006
-Thailand's Apichatpong Weerasethakul releases the bifurcated tribute to his parents Syndromes and a Century
-Ten Canoes is the first film made entirely in an Australian Aboriginal language
-Paris, je t'aime attempts to bring back the great omnibus films of the '60s with 18 segments by an international consortium of brand-name directors

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: THE HARDYMOBILE

No-one likes a prescriptivist, but I’m going to put on that hat for a moment anyway. It is preferable, I think, that movies should be movies first and foremost - that whatever it is they’re doing, it’s something that couldn’t be done in any other medium or art form. And this, I think further, is not a minimal requirement met by Locke, a fairly terrific exercise in writing psychologically revelatory dialogue to be delivered by a solitary actor giving everything he has to digging into that psychology. Except that as exercises go, this one is particularly exercisey never quite managing to make the character it depicts and his shifting perspective more important than the show-off hook that underpins the whole game. And even if it did, I don’t honestly know that Locke the one-man show in a black box theater would be even slightly less effective than Locke the one-man movie in a single tightly confined set.

Of course, there’s always the argument that Locke the movie is responsible for capturing the Tom Hardy performance without which it would surely not be so effective as it is, and for that, I am glad that the film exists as a film. Even if Hardy’s performance, however spectacularly difficult it must have been to do the heavy lifting in a film where his face and only his face is the focal point of something like 95% of the shots, is not without its limitations. Certainly, it’s not the all-time career peak some have noticed (I’d take his work in Bronson any day of the week), and if nothing else, he’d need to have some points taken away for the inexplicable accent he’s elected to sport for the 85-minute duration of the film, an effortful attempt at Welsh by way of Austria. Compounding things is that there’s no obvious reasons for the character to be Welsh in the first place: the name Ivan Locke certainly doesn’t suggest that, and when we hear his children speak on the phone, they sound nothing like him.

It’s a bizarre, off-putting misstep in a film that, relying completely on the strength of its central performance, can’t afford a single one, but if you can get over that hump (which took me fully 15 minutes), Hardy’s performance is an impressive display of carefully choosing a subtle range of expressions and weighted lines to give a perfectly-modulated performance of what amounts to a monologue for the intimacy of the movie camera. It’s quintessentially the kind of acting that works only if you fluently speak the language in which it was delivered, and can catch the interplay of vocal cadence with the movements of his face (since you are reading this English-language review of the English-language film, I take it this won’t be a problem), and like the film containing it, it always feels just a little bit like an experiment for the sake of it. But it’s a terribly impressive display of what film acting in 2013/2014 is capable of from a purely technical standpoint even so.

Ivan Locke, for the record, is driving a care late at night. For the first 10 or 15 minutes, we get to play at being detectives while he makes a number of organically cryptic phone calls to his family explaining that he has a work crisis and his work explaining that he has a family crisis. Both of which are true, as it turns out, though a bit of sleight-of-hand is involved. For he does indeed have a problem with his job as a construction manager, finding that the enormous delivery of cement he had planned for the morning has been hobbled by political and practical mistakes, and his second-in-command is by no means ready to deal with those issues. And he does indeed have a family problem, though it has nothing to do with his wife and sons, but with the baby about to be born as a result of an ill-advised affair with a middle-aged colleague. She's gone into premature labor, and things aren't looking great; Locke's current jog down the M1 is taking him to by with her out of a sense of grim duty. And as we learn during the downtimes when Locke isn't busily calling this person or that trying to keep his life from splitting off in a million directions, that sense of duty is directly related to his feelings of resentment to his deceased father, an alcoholic who abandoned his son in childhood.

Setting aside issues of taste (I think the movie arrives at the reveal that Locke is having a bastard child, by a woman he has no deep affection for and regrets sleeping with, far too early), this is all pretty crafty writing exploring a man's difficult battle with his demons, and other than the comedy sketch Welsh accent, Hardy does sterling work in evoking the shifting balance of self-loathing, pride in doing the right thing by everybody (and his astonishment that his wife might not be willing to play by his script for how they're going to rebuild), and the fatigued but iron-willed behavior of a professional who really doesn't want to deal with this shit right now, but the shit must be dealt with regardless. As an exercise in pure character building, it's a great one.

As an exercise in cinema, though, it's a little whiffy. Steven Knight writes a hell of a screenplay, giving the voice-only characters on the phone just enough distinct personality that it doesn't feel like we're trapped inside one man's head, while simultaneously making the exploration of that same man ring with authenticity and subtle touches. But his directing isn't up to the same level: he and cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos come up with a pretty limited repertoire of shots from various angles inside Locke's car, and the switch from one image to the next speaks less to editor Justine Wright's desire (or the flexibility of the footage she was given, more likely) to create a pulsing rhythm or using the visuals to punctuate the emotional beats of the story, than to the filmmakers' hope that if they cut often enough, the audience won't get bored. This ain't Buried, the last big "confined space on a phone" movie, where the camera was used to shape and intensify the space. It's just a film that takes place in a car, shot with little versatility or poetry. Obviously, that's not the be-all and end-all of art: the writing and acting are the reasons Locke exists, and they are just things. But they're not enough to help the film make the jump from a worthy experiment if you're in the mood for such things, to a great piece of cinema that's absolutely worth seeing.

7/10

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