BEST SHOT: THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL

This week in Hit Me with Your Best Shot, Nathaniel has assigned the Oscar-loved 1952 picture The Bad and the Beautiful, one of that decade's most celebrated "everything in Hollywood is toxic and evil" movies. It's essentially a hybrid of Citizen Kane and Sunset Blvd. done up in the MGM house style: which means that the cynicism of those movies is buried underneath a layer of melodrama that, I happen to think, keeps it from being nearly as essential as either of them. It is still, though an awfully fun poison pen love letter to the film community, with terrific performances across the board (ironically, the Oscar-winning turn by Gloria Grahame is one of the film's weakest), and gorgeous cinematography: it is, I do think, the best black-and-white work in the career of either director Vincente Minnelli or director of photography Robert Surtees, both of them men whose best visuals tend to involve color, 3-strip Technicolor when possible.

It's a bit embarrassing, then, that the shot I picked as my favorite in the film is far from the most gorgeous or visually complex in the picture. But sometimes personal sentiment will win out, and here's the thing: The Bad and the Beautiful is, stripped of all its narrative accretions (and they are, in fairness, some of the best parts), the biopic of a megalomaniacal film producer, Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas, giving one of his all-time best performances, combing charisma and rancidity in perfect balance), whose personal history is drawn from an assortment of real-life figures. Among those figures was RKO's legendary horror B-unit producer Val Lewton, an individual for whom I have considerable personal affection. So when reminded that this movie (which I last saw over a decade ago, when I knew much less about film history than I do now) included a sequence on the set of Doom of the Cat Man, an obvious ribbing of Lewton's magnificent Cat People, there was very little chance that I'd pick a shot from anyplace else in the film.

Nothing visually complex, nothing to unpack, nothing that even resonates thematically with the whole of the movie. It's just a little one-off joke about directing a child actress to scream like her life is in peril, stretched out just long enough that her terror ceases to register as anything but total fakery. Which is, after a fashion, the point of all these backstage Hollywood movies, and The Bad and the Beautiful especially (which, uniquely I believe, is about a producer, and thus more about the nuts and bolts economic aspects of cinema than even movies about a director would be.

Mostly, though, this is my inner fanboy speaking: look at how they made old horror pictures! Isn't that cool? Few movies about moviemaking are better at depicting the mechanics of it than The Bad and the Beautiful, and even if that's not the thing that Minnelli and company necessarily meant for me to walk away from the film with, it's my very favorite part; and this is where I feel happiest to be watching the movie. Which is also not what Minnelli and company wanted, but there are plenty of movies about venal people ruining other people's lives; there are not many films at all about Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur surrogates making a little girl freak out on cue, and for that, I will always privilege this film above its roots as a gossipy melodrama.

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TONY SCOTT: DÉJÀ VU (2006)

A re-review: I have mellowed somewhat in my feelings toward Déjà Vu since it was new, but not enough that I'd feel the need to revise anything I said before, except that my original review, however fair or not fair at the time, has become unspeakably tasteless in light of the manner of Scott's death on 19 August, 2012. I certainly don't want that to be my final statement on the matter, and this review, though changing little of my thoughts, greatly changes my expression.

As I stand behind my reviews of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 and Unstoppable - which I can now confidently call my third-favorite of the director's films, behind The Hunger and Crimson Tide - I will not be revising either of them (though I wish I hadn't given them the same fucking title), and my retrospective now comes to a close. Thanks to everyone who followed along and especially those who commented!

Though you could easily write a plot synopsis without bringing it up, there's no way to sum up the feel of Tony Scott's 2006 time-travel action picture Déjà Vu without noting that it is a pretty straightforward attempt to marry 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina in one all-encompassing delivery system for America's 2000s-era national PTSD. And maybe that's even an okay thing, as such, for it is the privilege of art to help a culture work through its psychological issues. But it would be even more okay if Déjà Vu wasn't, in fact, a Tony Scott film, since whatever charms that filmmaker has, emotional sincerity is not one of his strengths as a filmmaker. Look at it this way: the year prior, Steven Spielberg brought overt, explicit 9/11 imagery into War of the Worlds, a Tom Cruise action movie about giant alien spaceships blowing things up, and he made it feel legitimate and meaningful, because wrenching the viewer's tenderest heartstrings is what he does - his shtick, you might even say. Scott's shtick was to make things look like a TV commercial for violent lifestyles, and he was good at it, but that is maybe the worst possible tone to bring to a film seeking to pay any kind of appropriate tribute to two great tragedies.

Taking place in New Orleans, Louisiana, in February, 2006 (that is to say, just under half a year after Katrina devastated the city), Déjà Vu opens with a massive explosion on a ferry that kills more than five hundred innocents, whose deaths are depicted in appallingly tender detail for something that is meant to be horrifying, and it is easily the worst part of the whole picture. Among the many government agents brought into to figure out what the hell happened - at this point, it's not even clear that it's a crime or accident - we meet Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington) of the ATF, a New Orleans native and savant at reading crime scenes. It's he who finds the evidence proving this was a bomb; it's he, too, who discovers that one ravaged corpse in particular was killed long before the explosion, with her body left behind to be wiped out in the devastation, removing evidence of whatever separate crime left her dead. Intuiting that the smart money is on trying to solve her murder and not the bombing, Doug is ready to get to good old nuts and bolts policing, when FBI Special Agent Paul Pryzwarra (Val Kilmer) brings him along on a very special task force using high technology to stitch satellite imagery into a video loop that can be explored with unprecedented clarity and versatility, with the caveat that it can only display exactly what happened four days and six hours ago.

Indeed, it's higher tech than that: this mysterious operation is actually an honest-to-God time window, and what Doug is watching isn't a record of past events, but the actual events unfolding in real time. And it's while observing murder victim Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton) that he starts to formulate the idea not to solve the mystery of her death and the ghastly bombing, but to prevent those crimes from ever having taken place, though the projects tech heads Denny (Adam Goldberg) and Gunnars (Elden Henson) have no idea what would happen if they tried to send matter - let alone a human being - through their very arbitrary and irreplaceable wormhole.

Time travel movies that don't include the words "back", "to", or "future" in their title are alarmingly sensitive to all kinds of plot holes, and Déjà Vu, at least, only suffers from one basic misstep, which is that the rules of time travel seem to largely consist of "whatever will allow the most dramatic scene in this moment", which is why some of the individual technologies brought out don't seem to work exactly the way they're meant to, and why the big (and, to be frank, hackneyed) Fate vs. Free Will debate that ends up cropping up is sacrificed to the gods of a big "WOW" ending, regardless of whether that ending is emotionally earned the way that writers Bill Marsilii and Terry Rossio mean for it to be. Basically, it's a movie that cares more about what is cool than what makes sense, which only works to its benefit one single time: during a shamelessly awesome car chase in which Doug is watching, through his left eye, the rainy night of four days and six hours prior, chasing a past-car while attempting to dodge present-traffic on a crowded bridge. And perhaps it works a second time as well, in a single scene where a whole mess of erratic clues dribbled across the first hour suddenly erupt in an orgy of Doug trying to send himself a message across time, though this is hobbled a bit by the fact that the script flags each and every one of those clues a little too obviously as Something We Need To Notice For Later.

For the most part, though, Déjà Vu is a compromised half-measure of a film, too busy chasing it's admittedly fantastic science fiction concept to commit to being much of an action movie, while being so obviously terrified that its audience is made up of a bunch of meathead action junkies who won't be able to follow even marginally complicated concepts without a diagram. Thus it plods through exposition, repeatedly, and laboriously, practically daring us to be quicker on the uptake than Doug is (the fact that most of the exposition comes through Goldberg's mouth, with a spin on the words that can only be interpreted as "I am contemptuous of you and your remedial understanding of physics" certainly doesn't help with the idea that the filmmakers have no faith in their audience). It's too talky to be cool, and too concepty to be exciting, and that's even setting aside the giant elephant in the room, which is that it's unpleasantly exploitative of national tragedy (the villain, when we meet him, is an obvious Timothy McVeigh analogue, making it an American trauma threefer).

With Chris Lebenzon in the editing room and Paul Cameron on camera, one would expect an explosive eruption of style at least; these are the men, after all, responsible for Scott's best-cut film (Crimson Tide) and his best-shot (Man on Fire) and yet it's rather more sedate than it has every reason to be; perhaps the recent, chaotic, Domino had left the director weary of doing something too aggressive in its aesthetic, but while there's nothing wrong with the way the film was made, it's hardly impressive even at the level of glossy spectacle, like almost all of Scott's previous work with producer Jerry Bruckheimer; too much urban realism for that, but not enough for that to emerge as an aesthetic in its own right.

The single element that keeps Déjà Vu from evaporating entirely as a totally meaningless bit of junk is, not very shockingly, Washington, whose performance is better than the character deserves (the rest of the cast is pretty solid, at that, though he dominates the film far more than he dominates his other collaborations with Scott - even Man on Fire at least had all those two-hander scenes with Dakota Fanning), even though it is not a tremendously deep turn in the context of his career. Mostly, the actor coasts along on his steady voice, knowing eyes, and automatic gravity, but that's enough to sell us the idea that Doug is all the wonderful things the movie needs him to be. A little bit of actorly authority helps to keep the nonsense feeling plausible, at least, though it never becomes plausible enough to be dramatically effective, and it's certainly not enough to make a movie that's in love with its gimmick at the expense of everything else to work as a solid mystery narrative. But with Washington guiding the way, it at least manages to be painless, and it very directly paved the way for Scott's final pair of movies, which were rather more successful and a far better send-off to a spotty, but frequently appealing career of shiny entertainments and cinematic baubles.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THRILLERS ABOUT THE PRESIDENT'S STAFF

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: a twofer! With Paranoia, we have a thriller about a man whose job has unexpectedly thrust him into the shadowy world of espionage; with Lee Daniels' The Butler, a film about the life of one of the President of the United States of America's most trusted employees. Put them together, and you OBVIOUSLY have a '60s counterculture comedy with James Coburn. It could be no other way.

Almost as though it knew that its function to later generations would be as an immensely particular time capsule, The President's Analyst opens with a shot that's so proudly mired in the aesthetics at the moment of its creation (it could have come from anywhere in the 1967-'71 window; it happens to be from 1967, which I suppose makes it a trendsetter) that it's indistinguishable from parody. We start on a super-close, grainy shot of a rippling American flag, and ZOOOOOM back to a wide shot of a New York street corner, with the building upon which that flag was located all the way in the distance; then we ZOOOOOM in close to an obviously Up To No Good sort of fellow standing on that corner, having a cloak-and-daggery conversation. Ain't no zoom like a late-'60s zoom, I always say.

As things progress, we arrive in the company of Greenwich Village psychotherapist Dr. Sidney Schaefer (James Coburn), a man well-liked by his clients, but especially by a fellow named Don Masters (Godfrey Cambridge), who on this particular day reveals to his doctor a dream that he had, about a racial bullying incident from his childhood (it was when Masters first realised that the color of his skin made other people dislike him), and from there seamlessly glides into admitting that he's an agent with the U.S. intelligence-gathering organisation CEA (like its rival and sister agency, the FBR, the CEA was thus renamed in post-production dubbing, when it turned out that openly mocking the two real intelligence agencies in the United States was a good way to make enemies), and he hasn't been coming to Sidney for his own good, but because he's been assigned to vet therapists for the President of the United States himself.

Sidney jumps at the job, but problems start to crop up immediately: like how FBR director Henry Lux (Walter Burke) is convinced that his girlfriend Nan Butler (Joan Delaney) is a security risk, and after hardly any time in the job, being assaulted constantly by questions about his ability to keep a secret in light of his tendency to talk in his sleep and all, the President's analyst starts cracking up himself, convinced that he's being watched constantly (which he is), and that his life is in danger if he steps out of line even a little bit (which it is). So, politely shanghaiing a group of White House tourists, he disappears into the American countryside, and immediately becomes the target of the intelligence agencies of every nation in the world, with Masters and his old friend, the Soviet spy Kropotkin (Severn Darden, who doesn't even attempt a Russian accent, which is probably for the best), leading the charge to find Sidney and capture him. Or kill him. Or flip him. For his part, Sidney's cross-country trek has led him to run afoul of a most nefarious conspiracy even bigger than his wild paranoid fantasies ever suggested.

For a movie that never has anything in mind but to be a fleet, comic romp through the Cold War political scene and parody the paranoia thriller genre that hadn't technically been invented yet, The President's Analyst is shockingly difficult to parse, though some of that has more to do with watching it in the 21st Century, where it becomes a much weirder experience than it could have been in '67. Watching the movie, there is literally no chance of mistaking it for anything but a product of its time: not even a skillful pastiche of late-'60s filmmaking like Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery is that good, and the sheer glut of period-specific details dates The President's Analyst as much as any movie has ever been dated. There are aesthetic matters, like the zooms, the reliance on dissolve-heavy montages, the funky, poppy Lalo Schifrin score (and, in particular, the way the cinematography, score, and dissolves frequently work together to create what I can only call '60s funk music videos). There are plot matters, like the way that Sidney's flight takes him through a perfect cross-section of '60s types, including the obvious layover with some particularly dumb hippies (though it's safe to call it a left-wing comedy, The President's Analyst has absolutely no qualms about making fun of everybody in every direction), and the fact that the whole movie begins with the President of the United States needing a psychotherapist, which admittedly, could have been a plot point in the '50s as well. But it wasn't. There's the presence of Coburn, an actor whose comedies in the decade firmly established him as the perfect hybrid of countercultural instincts and arch-capitalist cool. There's the score, which I already mentioned, but I don't think you can possibly overestimate how fucking mired in 1967 Schifrin's score is. Have I mentioned lately that I adore Lalo Schifrin? Because it's not something you can ever say too many times.

This is the very opposite of a timeless movie, I mean to say, though it still has immense charm if you're not turned off by the very stuff of counterculture-era American film comedy, and that's a hugely defensible position to hold. They can be strenuously wacky, shrill things. But in this particular case, I find that Coburn's calm, intellectual presence keeps the silliest cartoon aspects in check, if indeed the way he grounds the film doesn't end up making the silliness work better: since it therefore exists in a world that has reality and context, instead of spilling this way and that without focus or wit or skill. The whole film, in fact, feels cooler (in both senses: hip, and subdued) than most other movies on the same model, with Cambridge and Darden giving unusually laid-back performances, and the best humor (like a sequence with a stern FBR agent correcting a boy in points of etiquette) is always played straight, rather than as slapstick.

There are problems here and there: there's an extended Beatles joke that, in the particulars, is at least two years out of date, the hippie scene drags, and Masters's therapy session includes a piercing, brutal discussion of a boy's awakening to racism in the world that is vastly out of place in a comedy, excepting that it is about the cultural climate of 1967, and The President's Analyst is deeply concerned with wallowing in that culture. But for the most part, writer-director Theodore J. Flicker (who almost exclusively worked in TV sitcoms - this was his first movie, in fact - and there's a faint mustiness of the television to his camera set-ups with DP William Fraker, who was just about to plunge into brilliance with Rosemary's Baby, the very next year) has a clean, efficient style that keeps the plot bubbling along, while giving the actors plenty of space to breathe and react and find the comedy, rather than pouncing at jokes. It's simply, breezy fun, but it always works, and that is always worthy of praise, not least in '67, when breeziness was often achieved with leaden joylessness.

All of that's well and good, but here's the really bizarre thing, and part of what makes watching it in 2010s so alarming: The President's Analyst is a shattering, merciless satire, and for all its impenetrable period trappings, it feels like it's speaking to the present day as much as to the moment of its creation; moreso, even, since the film's fantastic prediction about mobile communication technology seems so less ludicrously extreme than it did in the 1960s.

Breezy as it is, light as it is, silly as it is, this is a scorched-earth assault against the surveillance state, and the way that power is grabbed under the fig leaf of "we need to do this for your protection", shading into the even more vile "we're doing this for our profits, which you will surely not deny us, because you're not a pinko, are you?". It's mocking everyone across the board, from law-and-order fetishists, who blithely destroy the fact of personal freedom to preserve the notion of personal freedom, to self-described liberals who act just like the conservatives they claim to oppose, only with an ugly veneer of sanctimony on top of it. The President's Analyst finds American society - and Western society, and the world in general - broken and stupid, and instead of getting angry, it decides to laugh at everything miserable and awful, stripping it of its power by mocking it and making it seem like silly cartoon shenanigans.

Clearly, this is not an approach that worked; we still have a version of the society that The President's Analyst identifies. But for identifying the irrationality in human political behavior that was making the world such a dodgy place in the '60s, and continues to make the world a dodgy place now, the film is intelligent far beyond anything it looks like its doing; and by trivialising the people and beliefs it finds dangerous, it is an uncommonly brave political comedy. No, the film is not for all tastes, and carving out the satire from the loud period trappings takes work. But this kind of broadly likable, good-humored film being used as the vector for sharp, insightful satire is the kind of thing that simply does not happen anymore, and it's quite amazing to look back in time and seeing it done so remarkably well as it was in this instance.

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TONY SCOTT: DOMINO (2005)

One year after Man on Fire, Tony Scott directed Domino, and the vast chasm between the two of those films is telling. Of what, I'm not sure - but man, is it ever telling.

Domino, I believe, has its share of passionate defenders, and it ought to: it's the kind of movie precisely designed to have a small clutch of people whose enthusiasm for it knows no limits, and part of me dearly wishes I was in that group. Certainly, it's a pull-out-all-the-stops, damn-the-torpedoes orgasmic exercise in wall-to-wall visual and auditory craziness, and typically I am prone to like that sort of thing very much. But Tony Scott would have appeared to have found my wall: there is a point where I need something resembling content in order to get off on pure, abstract style, and Domino lacks that content. To say the least.

The film opens with an absolutely perfect pair of title cards: "This is based on a true story." "Sort of." Perfect, that is to say, in that it very much establishes what sort of mood we can expect the next two hours and change to play around in: it establishes a sense of snotty irony that is absolutely caked over every inch of the feature, with flippant attitude standing in for wit. It's not, "Most of what follows is true", is what I'm saying. Anyway, the sort-of true story is that of Domino Harvey (Keira Knightley), a bounty hunter living and mostly working in Southern California, where her beauty and ruthless efficiency set her apart in a field dominated by burly male ex-cons. Domino was the daughter of actor Laurence Harvey, who died when she was four years old; she spent some time as a model before a lifelong affection for violent adventure mixed with what the film promises us was a strange case of Daddy Issues sent her into her most curious career. It was because of the press accumulating around such an offbeat character that Scott first sought her out, striking up a friendship that would last the last ten years of her life or thereabouts, and convincing both of them that he absolutely had to make a movie about her exploits; it finally came out mere months after Harvey's death by drug overdose.

Now, what about Domino Harvey? That is not a question I am able to answer, for it is not something the film itself seems to have quite settled on. It is an unbelievably significant bit of trivia that Scott, who had been unable to fashion Harvey's life into a meaningful dramatic narrative despite years of trying, was inspired to hire Richard Kelly as screenwriter on the strength of reading his script for Southland Tales. A film that I will happily admit to enjoying for the sprawling, over-ambitious mess that it is, though I'm inclined to say that the script is the single worst element of the whole entire project, and hiring somebody to write you a movie specifically on the strength of that script is as much as saying, "Here. I would like for you to create an absolutely insane fucking disaster for me".

Sure enough, Domino is that insane fucking disaster. There's a plot - there's definitely a plot - there's so much plot that the whole movie threatens to choke to death on plot. But there's not much that happens. Basically, Domino, her boss Ed Moseby (Mickey Rourke, perfectly cast as a drugged-out man mountain), and her co-worker and semi-romantic-interest Choco (Édgar Ramírez) tackle a few bounty hunting cases sent their way by one Claremont Williams (Delroy Lindo), until they eventual get to That One Case, the one that was fucked-up from the word "go" by secrets and lies, in which the merry band of hunters end up on the wrong side of the law and the DMV, and Domino ends up relating the whole plot to FBI Agent Taryn Mills (Lucy Liu), from the omnipotent perspective of a framing narrative.

If you were to go through the events of the movie in a simple way, it's all very straightforward, but it was massively important to Scott and Kelly that it was not straightforward, and so the story (for which Steve Barancik was also credited, though Kelly never read his draft) hops back and forth between the framework and a variety of barely-established moments in the past, constantly shifting how much Domino "knows" about what went on when she wasn't present, and using Knightley's voiceover narration as a tool for constantly abstracting the content of the plot while saturating it in so much irony that it abandons having any baseline reality. And that's without bringing the style in, but let's hold off on that for a second. We're still at the point where, at the level of storytelling, Domino is actively trying to make itself more complicated than it is, solely to be messier and harder to parse.

Once we bring in style, well, damn. Superficially, this is apparently a continuation of what Scott was up to with Man on Fire, shot by his frequent collaborator Dan Mindel instead of Paul Cameron, which may or may not have anything to do with anything. The difference being that, for all that Man on Fire was a barrage, a constant assault that was great at knocking the viewer around like a ragdoll, it had a clear purpose: it was evoking the subjective perspective of its main character, aggressively visualising his emotions and the things he noticed and thought about. If that's going on in Domino, I can't track it. Sometimes it's subjective, stuck inside Domino's head. Frequently it's not. Either way, it's largely arbitrary: the sound hops around from speaker to speaker, sometimes with voices booming and sometimes with voices muffled and tinny; the film is constantly bathed in a putrescent yellow that couldn't look more like urine if Scott and Mindel had literally pissed on the camera negative; shots cut together with more regard for speed than coherency or even graphic compatibility; and the make-up that Knightley has been saddled with makes her look like a punk rock raccoon.

If anything, I suppose what the film is about is creating a visual corollary to the experience of living through its plot, though that same plot is so heightened that it's not fair to say that it corresponds to anything experienced by human beings in the real world. Still, it's bombastic and constantly keeps you from being relaxed in any way, just like the chaotic mess that the characters are living through, thanks to filmmakers who went out of their way to fabricate such a mess. That said, while visual anarchy can be starling and bracing in chunks, Domino quickly settles into a one-tone-fits-all groove that's desperately wearying: 20 minutes of the movie, with perhaps a slightly less florid approach to narrative (or, alternatively, no narrative at all) could be excitingly revolutionary, but two hours of it is grueling and tedious. It's style, but it's not an aesthetic: that implies some level of choice and concern for the shift in effect from moment to moment. Domino is a feature-length exercise in watching Tony Scott, totally unhinged, vomiting the id right onto a movie. I don't know whose id - his? Domino Harvey's? The character in the movie based on her? And nothing in this pulverising mess, however energetic and fast-paced, makes me want to find out.

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DISNEY SEQUELS: CRASH AND BURN

That there are two animated films in the summer of 2013 which both feature a creature that just wants to race, doggone it, no matter what institutional bias he faces from the powers-that-be because he belongs to the wrong species, and when he eventually manages to make it into the big show, he ends up squaring off against his idol, now revealed to be a complete asshole, is surprising. That, given this is the case, Turbo (racing snail) would prove to be at least the equal to Planes (racing crop duster) is discouraging. That Planes couldn't even manage to improve upon Cars 2 is downright heartbreaking.

For Planes is, if you've managed to miss hearing about it (and bless your dear innocent heart if that's the case), is a spin-off of Pixar Animation Studio's most widely-dislike films, Cars and Cars 2;* it does not otherwise have a single damn thing to do with Pixar, being as it was animated at India's Prana Animation Studios under the aegis of DisneyToon Studios, the company responsible for all those notorious direct-to-video sequels that John Lasseter ostensibly put a stop to back in 2008, on account of how they were diluting the value of the originals Given that Lasseter is, according to all available evidence, the single biggest fan of the Cars movies, one can barely stand to imagine how much it must have hurt him to executive produce this confounding extension of those movies' alternate universe, and presumably it was only to avoid hurting the feelings of the toy designers who, aw shucks, already had the prototype for the many marketing tie-ins ready for Planes that he did not likewise pull this one off the assembly line some early stage.

There's already enough evidence in this review for you to know exactly where things are going: in middle America, anthropomorphic crop duster Dusty Crophopper (Dane Cook) - pronounced "crawp-hawp-purr", not "crow-fop-per", which I just realised is what it looks like it should be when you see it written down like that - wants to be in the great Wings Across the World race, more than anything. Nobody takes him at all seriously, and he's doing serious damage to his innards by pushing so hard, but eventually he places, barely, in the qualifiers, and now with the aid of WWII veteran Skipper (Stacy Keach) he begins training to become the greatest kind of flyer, one who can compete with such legends of the sport as Mexican Stereotype (Carlos Alazraqui), British Stereotype (John Cleese), French-Canadian Stereotype (Julie Louis-Dreyfus, who's father was French, so apparently that's what makes it okay), and Somewhat Less Odious Indian Stereotype (Priyanka Chopra). You will undoubtedly drop dead of shock when I tell you that the final leg of the race comes down to a one-on-one face-off between Dusty and the complete asshole superstar Ripslinger (Roger Craig Smith).

I am, firstly, impressed that Planes manages to shameless copy both of its predecessors in the Cars franchise, in order - the first third of the movie is the "hotshot kid and crusty old guy" movie, the rest is the "grand prix" movie, and tragically, there are no ghastly redneck caricatures getting involved in an international espionage ring. There's simply not time for it: and whatever else is true of Planes, at least it's blessedly short. All the less time to spend with the thoroughly unlikable characters and tired performances, with Cook attempting a bland knock-off of Owen Wilson that neatly compliment's Keach's feeble impression of Paul Newman.

All the less time, as well, to deal with the mountain of insanity the movie adds to the Cars universe, which was already the strangest place in all of Pixar. This is not a world that benefits from adding too many details, as Cars 2 proved; with Planes, there are so many bizarre wrinkles - starting with the need for crop dusters and the crops they're dusting in a universe that has no animal life and thus no herbivores (there's a tossed-off line that you could force to be a reference to bio-fuels, if you squint) - that it becomes increasingly impossible to take the setting for what it is, and start to wondering Who builds these planes? and Why can you root around in a plane's engine and have a conversation with him at the same time? Wouldn't that be like taking out a human's heart? Why is there a military? And a World War II? Are the planes and the cars evolutionarily linked? Why are there so many of those little forklift people, who seem to be the primary species on the planet, and neither cars nor planes?

Admittedly, questions like these - and many, many others, crop up mostly because Planes offers nothing else to distract you, unless you are a small child (and, to its credit, the small children in the audience when I saw it were thoroughly entertained, though the were also ready for it to be only about one hour long), and thus lack the sophisticated understanding of narrative tropes that allows you to predict, in detail, the exact shape of the film's final 20 minutes, from within the opening 10. There's no substance to the characters or narrative at all; it's the worst kind of storytelling by fiat, in which we are informed that this is the protagonist that we shall find compelling and involving, without there being any good reason to find him either of those things, and that's even without the wall of impenetrable white noise that is Dane Cook attempting his god-damnedest to sound like a callow Jimmy Stewart-style American kid.

It looks... decent, at least. There's nothing wrong with the animation, except in that even Pixar, at the mid-to-late-'00s height of its creative powers, wasn't able to figure out a way to make its cars look entirely appealing, and cars already resemble faces more than planes do (except maybe a Cessna, and there isn't one of those, except for echoes in Dusty's design). So there's something uniquely and consistently unpleasant about looking at the characters, and that's always rough. But the actual rendering and coloring and texturing of these abominations is more than satisfactory; the backgrounds are pretty handsome, though never as lusty and rich as the "don't you fucking love the American Southwest" design mentality in Cars, and there's a terrific storm at sea in the back half of the movie that includes some truly marvelous effects animation. But you are unlikely to walk of Planes thinking that it is a nice thing to have looked; frankly, even enjoying visuals requires a certain degree of engagement that this utterly dull, artistic dead-end of a marketing gimmick refuses to provide. So there you have it: a movie so boring it can't even be pretty.

4/10

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TIM AT TFE: HERE BE DRAGONS

This week's slightly-delayed essay: a fortieth anniversary and the impending release of The Grandmaster makes for the ideal excuse to finally see Enter the Dragon.

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TONY SCOTT: MAN ON FIRE (2004)

The word "problematic" connotes different things to different people in different contexts, to the point where it's easier to use specifically to avoid committing oneself to anything specific and meaningful. Yet there are occasions where it's absolutely the perfect word: and if there was ever a platonic idea of a "problematic" motion picture, surely it would be Man on Fire, the 2004 kidnapping thriller which reteamed director Tony Scott and star Denzel Washington nine years after Crimson Tide, kicking off the last great collaboration of Scott's career: of his final five features (beginning with this one), four of them starred Washington, and both men benefited greatly from the team-up. But the mere fact that Washington's presence in Man on Fire means that it is very much the best version of itself that I can imagine isn't meant to distract from the more important fact, which is that saying that I like Man on Fire - and I do say that, in a long-gestating shift from the very emphatic dislike I felt when I last saw the movie the better part of a decade ago - makes me feel a little bit like I'm voting for racism.

So here's what we've got: a terrific opening 50 minutes with Washington getting a whole host of different moods to play and 9-year-old Dakota Fanning giving what might still actually be the best performance of her career, besting not just the sensitivity and complexity she displayed as the mind-rape vampire in The Twilight Saga: New Moon, but also the profoundity and range of her one-word performance in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2. It's also, pretty easily, the most aesthetically important film in Scott's career, and while "important" might seem like a silly word for it, I ask you to think of the sheer volume of movies in the last quarter century more or less explicitly designed to mimic Top Gun in every stylistic detail - it's "important", whatever other value we might ascribe to it.

The cinematography (by Paul Cameron, in the second of just three projects with Scott - the first was the short Beat the Devil - that made him, briefly, one of the most interesting cinematographers in America) and the editing (by Christian Wagner), and particularly the way that the cinematography and editing work in concert with one another, is frankly astounding. While it could not be any farther from "subtlety" - the film's visuals are a subtle as being run over by a tank - it's doing something that I can't recall having seen anywhere else: the way that the litany of film processing tricks (a cinematographer friend astutely suggests that Man on Fire was the last shot-on-celluloid movie that even today could not have been made digitally), including double-exposures and cross-fades and all sorts of marvelous things with saturation, and the continuity-optional flow of shots that cut so hazily with each other that it feels more like a continuum of images than a system of cutting takes together sometimes, end up combining to create a wholly visual subjectivity that gives the movie far more emotional heft than the plot (which isn't meaningfully subjective at all}, wouldn't likely achieve on its own.

And it's in service of a story that, though it's maybe not as thoroughly rancid as I took it to be once upon a time, is still mostly about killing Mexican people without any kind of moral cost for doing so. Now, that's baked into the scenario, a bit - the source novel by A.J. Quinnell, which Scott had been angling to adapt for years, was about a kidnapping in Italy, but by the time the movie was in production, Italy no longer had a systematic culture of kidnapping, whereas Mexico did, and that was a pretty significant shift that the story required in order to be functional - but just because something is legitimised by the story, doesn't make it any more palatable, or defensible. This is still a movie where anybody who ends up alive at the end of a very fucking bloody chain of revenge killings has a remarkably high likelihood of being A) white; B) female. And we're not really meant to be too much worked up about this.

So, in Mexico City, a prominent businessman named Samuel Ramos (Marc Anthony) and his American wife Lisa (Radha Mitchell) are on the hunt for the newest in a line of bodyguards for their beloved daughter Pita (Fanning, who looks half-Latina to about the same degree that Chiewetel Ejiofor looks like a native Swede). They settle upon John Creasy (Washington), formerly of the U.S. Marines, an emotionless drifter who needs to be sweet-talked into taking the job by evidently his only friend, or social acquaintance of any standing, Paul Rayburn (Christopher Walken, in an uncharacteristically sweet and friendly turn).

Creasy is a bit of a cold asshole to Pita, who patently wants to befriend the bodyguard, and much of the impeccable first half of the movie (it divides into two very different films almost exactly at the midway point) consists of the process by which the darling little girl slowly thaws out the bitter old man. Which is, let's face it, not a new plot, no more in 2004 than 2013, and not one we should encourage them to make more of. But the thing is, Washington and Fanning are terrifyingly good, with the kind of chemistry that you get one time out of 50 generically-plotted thrillers. Scott and screenwriter Brian Helgeland, one of the best writers that the director ever worked with, take far longer to flesh this out and slowly evolve the relationship between the two characters than you'd ever expect: it's a 146-minute action thriller where literally not one single action-packed or thrilling scene happens in the first hour. But Washington's gradual shift of Creasy's attitude (which seems, miraculously, to be happening without the character noticing it, making it far more convincing than so many cute kid/crabby adult pictures) is enthralling enough that even though, by rights, the film should be a wretched slog, it zips right on by.

Eventually, of course, Pita is kidnapped, and taken to be dead, and Creasy goes unhinged; the implication being that having someone to care for didn't make him a nicer, warmer man, but simply a mad dog when the thing he loved was taken away (it is due entirely to the way that Washington embodies this sense of scorched-earth rage, and the aforementioned subjectivity tricks in the visuals, that this doesn't end up having its own awful racial implications). Stylistically, this half of Man on Fire is just as exhilarating and unique as the first, and in that regard, I cannot speak against the film at all; and having down the languid work of building character in the first hour, the rest of the film earns no small amount of rage. But God, is this a dark piece of cinema. The implicit devaluation of people who aren't white Americans is already a red flag, but it's possibly not even as unsettling as the completely detached way that the film depicts the brutal acts of violence Creasy commits en route to finding and punishing the guilty. Again, this is a hugely subjective film; it does a fine job of showing violent acts as they are seen by a man driven so far over the bend by loss that he can no longer distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable acts. But that doesn't make it pleasant to watch, nor does it shake the sense that the movie really does not place any value whatsoever on the life of a human being, and finds nothing wrong with subjecting people guilty of not even terribly severe crimes to what can only be called torture.

None of this is sadistic: it's uncompromisingly nihilistic, which is almost worse. It does not care about the acts it's showing, and no matter how well Washington justifies that through his remarkable performance, I can't gin myself up to admire the film for it. So what to do? We have some beautiful character stuff, absolutely enthralling visual technique, and over an hour of material so scabrous that I feel like I need to shower just for watching it. The movie has an effect, you can't deny that; and having an emotional impact is something to be unreservedly, especially in movies made by such a glossy filmmaker as Scott. But it's brutal, and while I think, on balance, that I am quite glad to have revisited the movie for its many excellent strengths, it's just not the sort of thing you can go around recommending to people.

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