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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: THE LAST DANCE

The biographical documentary Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq looks like a TV episode and has the generic structure of a TV episode, and what do you know? That's because it is an episode of the PBS documentary series American Masters, given some extra breathing room and a tiny theatrical release. So it feels a little bit unsporting to sink too much energy into talking shit about its aesthetic and structure, even though those elements are extraordinary problems with the film - crippling problems, even, as it goes deeper into its running time and further along in history.

Tanaquil Le Clercq (pronounced "luh clair"), for those who don't know - and that describes most of us, I am sure, which is exactly the blind spot the film is designed to redress - was one of the most important American ballet dancers of the 20th Century, a muse of the great choreographers George Ballanchine and Jerome Robbins, the former of whom she married, the latter of whom she held at arm's distance all her life. If we take the testimonials given by her various friends in the film at face value (and why not? PBS isn't noted for its sensationalised content), her elongated, rail-thin frame established a new paradigm in the body types and physical movements that dance would favor in the future, and this was the great legacy of her career, stopped short when she contracted polio at age 26.

Afternoon of a Faun, named for a re-conceived Nijinsky ballet set to Debussy that Balanchine built around Le Clercq, tells its subject's life story in an extremely dry fashion, with personal remembrances delivered by people who knew and worked with her, arranged by director Nancy Buirski in straightforward, chronological order. Interrupting these stories are excerpts from Le Clercq and Robbins's letters, read by Marianne Bower and Michael Stuhlbarg, and this gives the movie a bit of deeper personality and texture than just hearing people relate the life story of their friend as, well, a history. Afternoon of a Faun is long on information, but low on insight: it does not succeed much at all in letting us get inside Le Clercq's head, since virtually all of its knowledge is provided by people who did not always quite see all the way inside the Le Clercq/Ballanchine marriage, apparently as difficult as any domestic situation involving two artists, one of them a man with a long history of short marriages, could manage to be. And since, following her illness, Le Clercq pulled away from the society of other humans for a great many years, leaving nobody that Buirski had access to with any real ability to speak to the crises faced by the dancer at that point in her life.

The documentary that results is lopsided and a bit frustrating, telling a story of a woman who had polio kind of happen at her rather than dig into what that illness meant. Perhaps there was no way around this, but the film's commitment to its basic, off-the-shelf talking heads construction certainly wouldn't yield any possibilities. Probably by design, Buirski has assembled a lecture, with all the facts laid out in neat, indisputable order, but not much of an emotional appeal, no matter how much the people who knew and obviously loved Tanny (as she is universally referred to by her intimates) express their affection in sweetly unguarded moments. And the carefully-researched feeling ends up spending so much time on context that for long stretches it feels more like the story of George Balanchine and his amazing successes with the lanky genius dancer he married that one time.

What picks the film up, and gives it some real cinematic appeal beyond the inherent interest of learning the basic facts of an artist whose skill and impact outweigh her limited name recognition, is the vintage material Buirski has assembled, whether in the form of an audio interview Le Clercq gave late in her life, reflecting with the wise detachment of an elegant, guarded lady of the upper class, or - much better still - in the footage of Balanchine's dances and Le Clercq especially from across her whole career. The chronological structure of the film means that almost all of this is frontloaded, and dries up right around the same time that the film starts to go slack and shallow in its treatment of her experiences. But while it's there, it elevates Afternoon of a Faun into the stratosphere. For there is a great deal of it, and it is cunningly woven in with the verbal reminiscences, and it reveals a dancer who is every bit the magnetic alien described by her eulogists. Without needing one scrap of historical context, Afternoon of a Faun makes all the argument it needs to for Le Clercq's brilliance simply through showing us Le Clercq in motion, for long, minimally-edited vintage sequences that have been gathering dust for God knows how long. The film would be valuable for collecting this footage and presenting it in a clear, well-organised way even if its lapses as documentary cinema and storytelling device were far more serious than they are.

There's nothing at all going on in the film that makes it recommend itself to anyone who isn't already mostly in the bag for this kind of thing: it assumes you already care about ballet, for one thing, and have a vested interest in learning about the politics and personal dramas of midcentury dance professionals. It assumes a PBS audience, in other words, and the limitations forced upon it by its inception are never questioned, let alone stretched. But for such a rudimentary, paint-by-numbers technique, Le Clercq does make for a good subject, and while Afternoon of a Faun isn't very much fun on any level, its content is interesting, and the woman at its center clearly worthy of greater attention. Given that providing that attention with minimal possible editorial distraction is all this film ever apparently wanted to do, it has to count as a success.

6/10

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THE LITTLE DRUMMER BOY

Hype is a brutal fucker. Coming to Whiplash cold, it might be entirely possible to find it a fun, nervy little sudser about Type-A personalities clashing with lacerating verbal violence, done up in an appropriately hyper if not terribly innovative style. Coming to it, instead, with the knowledge that it’s pretty much a done deal for an Oscar nomination or five, my response is instead a baffled, almost hostile, Really? That? It’s satisfyingly ragey soap opera for boys (and there’s another whole conversation to be had about the critical reception of certain genres, backstage melodramas, say, when they are focused on males instead of females; especially in the the case of a film where there’s a grand total of one major character who is a woman, a totally generic girlfriend who could be cut out of the film entirely with only minor changes made to the whole. But that is not this conversation), and it has a real barnburner of a performance bringing the antagonist to life, and the setting in the high-stakes world of top-tier New York jazz conservatories is novel, if not inherently grabby. But there’s not much about it that’s terribly special: back in the ‘90s, when style-driven indies were easier to find than they are now, there were a dozen films like this every single year. Though I suppose the fact that it hearkens back to a more robust period in the indie marketplace is something.

Something of a dark parody of the stock inspirational teacher film, Whiplash is the story of Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller), New York native, son of a happily unexceptional high school writing teacher (Paul Reiser), and hellbent on becoming the greatest jazz drummer of his generation. To that end, he has managed to enroll in the highly competitive and prestigious Shaffer Conservatory, where his relentless after-hours practicing catches the eye of Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons). Fletcher is the most celebrated instructor in the school, and the band he leads the most sought-after ensemble, but he’s also a verbally (and sometimes physically) abusive taskmaster, who has no mercy, forgives no mistakes, and has a seemingly bottomless well of imaginative cruelty to harass and push his students. Andrew has the terrible misfortune, or the great luck, if you look at it from a certain angle, to show the kind of promise that Fletcher has been hunting for his entire career, and thus the 19-year-old is subjected to the largest quantity of the bandleader’s dictatorial attentions. A bond forms between the two, but it is not an affectionate one; it is savage and relentless.

Points for bluntness of theme: without moralising one way or the other, Whiplash unapologetically claims that most of us are not special snowflakes, and that becoming exceptional takes a terrifying commitment that leaves little room for maintaining your humanity. And that’s a lot more honest and interesting than more of the usual “you can do it! whee!” boilerplate. It’s guilty of over-enunciating this idea, to be sure - it is spelled out explicitly in dialogue twice, once in a scene that works because of Simmons’s offhand delivery, once in a ghastly scene set around a dinner table that’s one of the most archly over-written things on offer in 2014 - and its commitment to not expressing an opinion whether the sacrifice of one’s soul is worth becoming a great artist does, at times, leave it feeling like it lacks a point of view or an overall purpose.

But then, the purpose is to be a corker of a two-hander, with Simmons spitting out the words of writer-director Damien Chazelle’s dialogue like a WWII bomber leveling a European city, and Teller managing just to hold on, which is pretty much all the script permits to the character for the first two-thirds or better. It’s a thriller at heart, which models itself after its protagonist’s frenzied drumming, building up in speed and collapsing and then starting off right where it left off. If the results are somewhat monotonous in tone, it’s not really fair to call that either a shortcoming of the movie, or a mistake: it is about single-minded people pushing themselves harder and harder and harder, so a certain single-mindedness and linear momentum is appropriate. The acting certainly falls in line with that - it is by far the most effective performance I have ever seen Teller give, in large part because it requires only a narrow range of expression - touching on the essential qualities of the characters without muddying them down with too much technique that would only tend to distract from the film’s overall momentum (it’s for this reason not at all Simmons’s best performance - perfect for the role, but a bit mechanical and too much on the surface - though I ‘m not going to begrudge him the Oscar nomination he has locked down for delivering it).

It is a sinewy film, all tensed-up and propulsive and alert, and while Chazelle relies a bit too heavily on close-ups of bloody hands and sweaty faces to put over the psychological cost of all that tension, the film's best moments (virtually all of them related to musical performance) are genuinely impressive filmmaking that suggest the first-time director's potential to do something great, though they're too conspicuous and isolated for me to credit that this is that great thing. The best scene, by far, is the last, which I hesitate to even describe (the entire edifice of the plot would disintegrate without the things it reveals about Andrew's mind, but it also feels anything but inevitable), but it's the one place where the editing, the camera angles, and the sound design - which is wonderful throughout, making the instruments and music active, physical characters alongside the people - are all working to create an excellent piece of physical cinema, hot and frenzied. The slower, more openly character-based scenes are a bit rockier; outside of his core duo, Chazelle has not deigned to give any of his side characters inner life, and this results in some strained, tedious places where Andrew is being fed lines by joylessly functional stick figures, and Teller screws himself up a little too hard to provide two characters' worth of emotion. But the good parts are very good, and the bad parts are unexceptionally mediocre, and even if it's nowhere remotely near the year's ten best films, Whiplash is an enjoyable potboiler with just enough insight into alpha male desire to feel like something slightly deeper.

7/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: DUNE AND DUSTED

The facts of the history related by Jodorowsky's Dune are thus: in 1975, Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, having made in quick succession the films El topo and The Holy Mountain, had become a massive celebrity among the art film set, virtually inventing the concept of the midnight movie. He was in a position that few directors reach, and virtually none with such radical artistic amibitions, which is that he had a blank check to do whatever he wanted. And, largely on the spur of the moment, he wanted to make a film of Frank Herbert's massive, indescribably important science fiction novel Dune.

Over the next couple of years, Jodorowsky assembled a dream team of designers, including French graphic artist Moebius, American effects designer and filmmaker-of-all-trades Dan O'Bannon, and British illustrator Chris Foss, and proceeded to build his universe. And what a universe it was! Jodorowsky's Dune was ambitious beyond the scope that filmmaking in the mid-'70s was even slightly capable of, an hours-long epic experience full of effects work that's frankly impossible to imagine carrying off without recourse to animation and computers. No studio was even a little tempted to take on such an expensive proposition whose full-throated commitment to avante-garde spirituality made it a guaranteed money loser, and so the film died, while Star Wars came along and re-shaped science fiction filmmaking its own image. But even in death, Dune begat marvels: its massive book of concept art has influenced decades of subsequent films, either implicitly or directly. For one thing, O'Bannon would not have written Alien without Jodorowsky's Dune, nor would H.R. Giger (who had never worked in film before Jodorowsky lassoed him) have designed its titular beast. And that alone would change the fantasy and sci-fi landscape in a great many ways.

So that, anyway, is what happened. Jodorowsky's Dune is about two things: one, it tells that story, at length and with an easy, stretched-out attitude. Two, it tries to communicate, in some small way, what that film might possibly have looked like, throwing concept art at the camera every so often and animating it to suggest, in the broadest sense, the scale and visual splendor of the film that wasn't. All of which is interesting enough, but only really to sci-fi buffs and film historians, and director Frank Pavich isn't a very flexible or imaginative documentary maker. Jodorowsky's Dune has the aesthetic of a TV episode, intercutting wave after wave of talking heads with not nearly as much visualisation of Jodorowsky's dream project as one could easily hope for, since what we see of the film looks absolutely jaw-dropping.

In short, Jodorowsky's Dune could easily be written off as slack, workaday filmmaking, more of a DVD special feature than a standalone motion picture, except for one thing: it has, in Alejandro Jodorowsky himself, an amazing, one-of-a-kind storyteller, whose enthusiasm for the film he didn't get to make is electrifying and magnetic, even after almost 40 years. The 84-year-old director (who came out of retirement as a result of his involvement with this documentary, making The Dance of Reality in 2013) positively glows with enthusiasm and passion as he describes the philosophy and spirituality behind his filmmaking career, and the consciousness-changing experience he wanted his Dune to be; as he talks about his experience finding Moebius and Giger, he feels like a genuine art enthusiast proudly sharing his interests and insights. He even feels smugly, relatably human when he talks about his shameful joy at finding out that David Lynch's film of Dune from 1984, produced by Dino De Laurentiis, was a dismal, incoherent misfire. Hearing Jodorowsky relate his life and tell the story and themes of his Dune is an absolute privilege; it's like finding yourself seated at a long dinner next to the most animated raconteur you will ever meet, and as much pleasure as Jodorowsky's Dune offers in showcasing the images of the failed film, the pleasure in getting to listen to Jodorowsky and watch his amiable, excited face is far, far greater.

The net experience, then, is a good one, though there are some pretty rough spots throughout - in addition to his lack of formal imagination, Pavich has some questionable instincts. The most dubious misstep is the choice of interview subjects: director Nicolas Winding Refn makes at least a kind of sense, as he was given a tour of the Dune concept art book by Jodorowsky himself, and has solid insights as a result, even when he starts to wax rhapsodic about the transformative possibilities of this movie and the fear in Hollywood that shut it down (the fear of losing a shitpile of money, yes; the fear of transgressive art, probably less so), suggesting a bit more fannish enthusiasm than critical awareness. Showing even less critical awareness: film critics Devin Faraci and Drew McWeeny, a rather odd pair of experts to rely on, whose ability to form links where they don't belong (e.g. "this somewhat unexceptional shot set-up could only mean that this director saw the Dune material and copied it!") doesn't always come close to passing the smell test. Pavich waves through their theories without hesitation; he's clearly smitten with his material as well, and doesn't appear to suppose that anybody on any side of the camera could do with a little bit of cold objectivity.

This doesn't make Jodorowsky's Dune any less enjoyable, but it does make it less informative, or at least makes it feel less trustworthy, which amounts to the same thing. It's a boosterish film, a documentary only because it reveals a history (and a worthwhile history at that), but certainly not because it has a strong journalistic spine. It's a skillful sales pitch for a film that cannot exist, and which gives considerable joy to those involved to remember as the best work they almost did; their enthusiasm is contagious, but there's still a kind of shallowness built into the project. While Jodorowsky's Dune does a fine job of suggesting that Jodorowsky's Dune would have been marvelous, and possibly even the great work of spiritual philosophy the director wanted, but it never quite admits that maybe the thinking about it was the best part of all, and the execution might not have been up to the inspiration. Still, the inspiration is pretty damn inspiring for all that, and Jodorowsky is such a blast that it's easy to want to be on his side. Sometimes, hearing a yarn spun with energy and commitment is more important than all the big budgets and enormous scope in the world.

7/10

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DUMB IS AS DUMB DOES

There is one thing that I can say in praise of Dumb and Dumber To, so I might as well lead off with it. It has a certain casual, easy comfort to its style. That is to say, it's a film that picks up the baton of mid-to-late-'90s comedy filmmaking quite effortless and without strain: this is true of the acting as well. Yes, the script is forced to acknowledge that 20 years have gone by since the original Dumb and Dumber, and those years have worn hard enough on co-stars Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels that it's kind of uncomfortable to look at them goofing around like big kids. But in general, it has the texture, pacing, and energy of a film that might have come out around 1996 or '97. Y'know, right around the time that a Dumb and Dumber sequel would have felt appropriate and natural, and not like a desperate bid for relevance by a whole bunch of people whose careers have been out of gas for years and years - I mean, hell, when was the last film made by brothers Bobby & Peter Farrelly that actually made any kind of real impact?

So yes, as a piece of '90s nostalgia, Dumb and Dumber To - which is the best possible title for it, if I'm going to keep hunting for nice things to say - at least understands and appreciates the '90s, and recycles them effectively. Which is something, I guess, but it would be much, much more if the film's archaeological precision was in service to something with more meat on its bones than this pathetic re-tread, which somehow took six credited writers to cobble together, despite fully half of the content being re-dressed or outright re-used jokes from the original film. The plot, once again, is a travelogue: best friends and dysfunctional idiots Lloyd Christmas (Carrey) and Harry Dunne (Daniels) are back in action after 20 years, during which time Lloyd has been faking a catatonic state as a prank against his buddy. Harry's kidneys are about to fail him, and he's discovered that a fling 22 years ago with the legendarily promiscuous Fraida Felcher (played in the present by Kathleen Turner, whose admirable openness about taking this role for pragmatic reasons does not make it any more pleasant to watch such an iconic star make her big comeback as the butt of such mean-spirited jokes as the film blandly lobs her way) led to a daughter. Hoping that she'll donate an organ, the man-boys truck out to find where she ended up after Fraida put her up for adoption, only to end up on the wrong side of a conniving stepmother (Laurie Holden) and handyman (Rob Riggle), hoping to kill the girl's adoptive father (Steve Tom) for his millions and his world-changing new invention. It then takes another road trip out to El Paso, to crash a weak-kneed parody of a TED conference where the daughter, Penny (Rachel Melvin) is accepting an award on her father's behalf. And along the way, Harry and Lloyd are virtually always dumb, when they are not dumber.

It's impressive, after so many years since his heyday, to find that Carrey (51 at the time of shooting) still has the ability to wheel his head around like a whirligig, and flex seemingly every single one of his facial muscles in a different direction all at once (though I must confess to never having found that shtick funny when it was new, and I'm surely no more inclined to it now). And he and Daniels fall instantly into the most relaxed, natural rhythm of feeding off of each other, reacting and leading, stretching moments until they're about to break, and playing the duo's bits and routines with the timing of ballroom dancing and table tennis combined. But mechanically impressive comic acting is all for naught if there's no comedy to back it up, and Dumb and Dumber To is a skeletal wasteland of uninspired, witless non-humor. The Farrelly's humor hasn't felt boldly trashy or dangerous in many, many years, and the calculated packaging of outrageous behavior is the exact antithesis of the sneering, anarchic obnoxious that made them the most successfully edgy mainstream comic filmmakers of the '90s. Dumb and Dumber To is everything and anything but outrageous. It tries, but the same old gross-out sex jokes and low-key bodily fluid humor feels ossified and underwhelming now. Even as someone who never found Dumb and Dumber worth much of anything, I can recognise that film's brazenness; its sequel is a calculated marketing effort, and that shows through every belabored gag set-up and lazy one-note joke bloated out beyond its appropriate limitations.

I don't know that it's surprising that this is where '90s nostalgia leads us: the flailing, overly self-aware pop culture of that period was hardly interesting the first time, with its desire to make everything extreme and loud clashing with the era's unusual facility with recycling. Trying to revisit Dumb and Dumber is self-defeating: one generation's brash newcomer is the next generation's quaint old-fashioned piffle. And this is precisely the pit into which Dumb and Dumber To falls: it combines boringly obvious jokes and plot developments with a misguided hope that bratty attitude and yelling will somehow give it all a sharp comic edge, and this bond doesn't hold even a little bit. It's easy to imagine far worse belated sequels than this, but in terms of being pointless and pathetic and obvious in its elevation of mercenary over artistic concerns, it's hard to name a recent sequel that has been more thoroughly unwanted, unneeded, and disposable.

3/10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: JAMES FRANCO'S HOME MOVIES

To hear directors James Franco and Travis Matthews tell it - and oh, how much you get to hear Franco tell it, over and over, across the movie's achingly long 60 minutes - the purpose of Interior. Leather Bar. is to interrogate the comfort level of the viewer and performer alike surrounding explicit gay sex in cinema, in art, and in real life. But around the five minute mark, the film shares its actual purpose, in the foggy phrasing of actor Val Lauren, the anchor of Franco's experiment:

"I don't personally like this project, personally. It doesn't, I don't, nothing artistic in it, right now. Maybe it's 'cause of my lack of understanding of what it is, doesn't respond to it. What I do respond to, and always have is his mission [points to Franco]. I like James's mission, I don't always understand it, but I like it. I like it. I like what he's doing, even when I don't understand it, and I'm into supporting it and being a part of it."

Let's summarise, to clean up the talky, inarticulate stumbling over language, which is itself a key part of Interior. Leather Bar.'s aesthetic: "this idea is dumb, confusing, and underthought, but if James Franco wants to do it, then let's go ahead and do it".

Interior. Leather Bar. is a categorically difficult little beastie, taking the form of a documentary but obviously scripted, and yet the thing it purports to document is actually being documented, though not depicted. Let me start over again. Interior. Leather Bar. finds Franco and Matthews deciding to re-imagine 40 minutes of gay sex supposedly cut from William Friedkin's 1980 thriller Cruising (about five seconds of practical thought makes it pretty obvious that no such footage could imaginably have been shot, if for no other reason than the implausibility of Cruising having been conceived as a film that was two-fifths gay sex; it's not clear if Franco and Matthews, at any level of fictional or nonfictional remove, indulged in that five seconds). In the role of the character originally played by Al Pacino, they cast one of Franco's current favorite meat puppets in his weird art projects, Val Lauren. The film consists of Franco enthusiastically talking about how boldly his project is confronting reflexive heternormative values and representations, while Lauren wonders if it's a violation of ethics, taste, or his personal sexual comfort levels for him to watch as other people have sex in front of a camera.

The film doesn't try very hard to keep up the pretense that it has anything to do with Cruising, a dull potboiler whose latter-day recovery by a certain strain of queer theorists hasn't managed to address the fact that even if it has some interesting representations, it's still pretty crummy at basic thriller mechanics. From the evidence of how they frame (and frame, and frame) their arguments, their images, and their performances, it's entirely possible that neither Franco nor Matthews hasn't even seen Cruising. Instead, it is a platform to allow Franco, playing a modulated, scripted version of himself (Matthews is the film's credited writer), to launch into a series of painful exploratory discussions about what this whole experiment means in the grander scheme of society, and how daring he is for asking these intensely bold questions about what we are and are not comfortable with, and why. Questions that are mind-numbingly juvenile, and cannot possibly come across as new or probing to any of the very self-selecting audience for an experimental psuedo-documentary full of explicit man-on-man blowjobs.

Mostly, Interior. Leather Bar. is massively fascinated with and impressed by James Franco, self-challenging heterosexual visionary whose desire to break down the limitations of labeling and normalising things results in this film about filming the making of a film based on another film. It is possible, and indeed pleasurable, to imagine a version of this film as filtered through the mind of Christopher Guest, where the mingling of documentary and mockumentary would serve to poke fun at the rambling pretension of the actor/scholar/director/author who surrounds himself with people too cowed by his power over all of them (just several weeks after this film's debut at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, Franco appeared as the lead in Disney's ungainly Oz the Great and Powerful, a fact observed here multiple times) to call him on his aimless verbal splattering, too directionless to work even as provocation. Even Lauren's film-long reiterations of his feeling that the film is a bad idea that makes no sense and makes him feel uncomfortable as an actor is constantly framed in terms of his admiration for Franco, and his conviction that it must be in the service of some greater social purpose, or it wouldn't be happening.

At times, almost exclusively in the second half (when the action moves to the film set, and away from Franco's head), there are flashes of the film that Interior. Leather Bar. could have been in the hands of someone with a stronger head for filmmaking, queer theory, or both, than this film evinces (Matthews is an award-winning director of documentary films about the gay male experience, so I am compelled to assume and hope that he's capable of more thoughtful filmmaking than the mish-mash on display here). The best sequence, by far, starts with the recreated footage of two men engaged in oral sex, with pulsing lights and music, cutting suddenly and harshly to the filmmakers shooting their act from multiple cameras, a stark and dare I say it, witty depiction of the distinctly anti-sexy ways in which onscreen sex is filmed, a matter of angles and lighting and choreography. It's a moment that feels like it actually has something to say, and keen insights into its subject matter; other moments like this are peppered in the last half-hour, though it is a chore to find them.

Having something to say, though, is not typically high on the film's agenda. Having something to ask is, but the film so joylessly over-enunciates all of its questions in bluntly literal ways that it leaves the viewer with nothing to engage with, no work to do ourselves. The film could just as easily function as a series of tweets, and even then, it would tend to reveal more about the author's lack of experience with social issues that have been debated well into the past, and on more interesting, sophisticated battlegrounds than Interior. Leather Bar.. Franco, or "Franco", at several points confesses that he's making this project mostly to see whatever happens: that approach can yield surprising, unmediated insights, but as this film proves, it's far likelier for it to end in frivolous tedium.

4/10

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