Das Weisse Band, or as it is grudgingly known in English The White Ribbon is the 2009 Palme D’Or winning film by Michael Haneke, an Austrian filmmaker who’s most notable leitmotif is hostility toward the audience. Whether or not you like his films will boil down to your position on that issue, and quite honestly, if you think that going to the movies should involve some glimmer of entertainment, then stop reading now. Michael Haneke despises you and your gluttonous, popcorn-guzzling ways. If you have a quarrelsome streak, and have a fondness for arguing with the inexplicable, then you’ve just found your Citizen Kane.

The White Ribbon is set in a small Austrian village on the eve of World War I. A storm is coming, and it appears to begin with a malicious prank. The town doctor thrown from his horse when it gallops into a wire strung across the path. The doctor is thrown off and shatters his collarbone, and the close-knit town can find no motive or suspects. Days later, an accident in the mill begins to reinforce the suspicions and paranoia. Gradually, the idyllic life becomes routinely shattered with inexplicable acts of violence and soon everyone in town – from the Baron and the pastor, to the doctor and the farm workers – are all caught in a growing cloud of darkness.

Who among the villagers is responsible for these deeds? Who is covering them up? Haneke won’t answer those questions, and the film’s power is in its stern refusal to even address them. Evil isn’t the product of a single, discernable event, Haneke seems to be saying, it’s merely part of a grand cycle that passes from generation to generation. And once it takes root, it’s impossible to weed out.

The stark black and white cinematography adds to the air of vaguely defined menace that suffuses the village. The film was originally shot in color and converted to black and white in post-production, which, as many critics have noted, seems to have drained the film of any glimmer of hope. The crisp focus and blown-out highlights film each frame with intense detail and complete opacity. It is meticulous cinematography, every frame is precisely calibrated. The glacial tempo is strictly regulated and the soundtrack is painfully dry.

Critics have been enraptured by the film, because it’s the kind of film that appeals almost exclusively to critics. Read Ebert’s thoughts here. Anthony Lane blends a review with a tongue-bath of a profile of Haneke, and thoroughly slobbers over both (New Yorker, October 5, 2009; subscription required).

In Lane’s article, one of the early quotes from Haneke seems to sum up his position as an artist:

“I hate the smell of popcorn. I rarely go to the cinema… The spectators seem to have lost respect for the film.”

A profile in the New York Times magazine for his 2008 film Funny Games reinforces that.

“I’ve been accused of ‘raping’ the audience in my films, and I admit to that freely — all movies assault the viewer in one way or another. What’s different about my films is this: I’m trying to rape the viewer into independence.”

Stay classy, Michael Haneke. His work, however, is an interesting paradox. Countless art school dropouts have attempted to “rape the audience” with their work, but Haneke is one of the few who succeeds in making people ask for it. His films tease and beguile, luring you in with the promise of catharsis and then torturously refuse to deliver. Yet, as audience raping goes, Haneke does a far better and more thorough job than verzogener Fratz like Darren Aronofsky.

Haneke gets away with it because is an exquisite craftsman as a director. His work has a technically precise feel that clutches you by the throat even when the film is meandering through a sunny field. Even his admirers will admit his films are profoundly uncomfortable to sit through, and like any exercise in masochism, it forces to you reflect upon why you’ve just done that to yourself.

If you want answers, this is not a movie for you. The White Ribbon won’t even bother to answer your questions with other questions. Try to probe its mysteries and the film would laugh at your efforts, if it deigned to notice you at all.

Perhaps the film is a Zen koan – a riddle designed to probe the incomprehensible. As an audience member, I found The White Ribbon insulting and tedious. As a critic, I found it tiresome and opaque. Wearing either hat, I wouldn’t recommend that anybody go to see it. But whether it’s a study in arrogance, pomposity, or mundane belligerence, anybody who goes to movies to not enjoy them should make extra effort to seek this out.

With Robert DeNiro as his muse, Scorsese crafted cinematic classics like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas. With DiCaprio, he’s delivered the abstruse and turgid train wrecks Gangs Of New York, The Aviator, and now, Shutter Island. Simultaneously noisy and tiresome, the film expends so much energy trying to conceal its central gimmick that it spirals out of control. And without any real point of focus, all the sturm und drang dissipates like a whisper in a hurricane.

From the opening frames, where a ferry slowly drifts out of an impossibly opaque fog bank, the film announces its agenda to deliberately withhold the bigger picture. Unfortunately, that’s the only thing the film decides to withhold, because the rest of the film is overstuffed with a collection of thrown-together noir movie cliches.

Leonardo DiCaprio scrunches his face into knots to play Teddy Daniels, a man who constantly insists that he is a United States Marshall. He arrives on Shutter Island with a brand new partner to investigate the escape of a prisoner while, naturally, a hurricane is bearing down on the island. The hospital is run by the mysterious Dr. Cawling, played by the shaven head of Ben Kingsley. When Max Von Sydow shows up as a German doctor, the alarm bells of suspicion turn into red flags of absurdity. Von Sydow couldn’t appear benevolent if he walked onscreen carrying a bouquet of roses, surrounded by animated bluebirds.

The escaped prisoner plot line quickly takes a back seat to implications of nefarious conspiracies, personal vengeance, and Nazi-science experiment surgeries. The facility on Shutter Island isn’t the only one with a hidden agenda. Teddy, it turns out, believes the man who killed his wife has been hidden away in the bowels of the hospital, and he’s on an unofficial mission to find him. It also comes as no surprise to learn that Teddy is a haunted man, plagued by visions of his dead wife and his experiences in World War II. As the investigation plods onward, Teddy devolves into a hospital orderly, an inmate, and a fugitive.

Unfortunately, the trailer tips off almost all of the plot, and every scene carries the scent of suspicion. Misdirection hangs in the air like a thick fog, and nothing that we can actually see is engaging on its own, semi-obscured terms. The mysterious flashbacks are inexplicably psychedelic, and the powers-that-be on the island are improbably obscure. As the incongruities mount, that sense of withholding becomes fatally distracting. When Teddy has a crucial confrontation with a prisoner, you can’t help but wonder which cliché will ultimately explain everything. Is it the Jacob’s Ladder purgatory? The Angel Heart descent into hell? The sinister conspiracy that ensnares Teddy a la Arlington Road?

The problem with Shutter Island is that it violates the trust between the audience and the storyteller. Movies that have a successful twist have to operate on two levels. With or without knowledge of the bigger picture, every scene has to make sense both ways. For all the logistical nonsense of Fight Club and solemn misdirection of The Sixth Sense, the first two acts of both films are comprehensible and emotionally engaging on their own. By the time the narrative is stood sideways, it’s an enhancement, not a relief. On Shutter Island, the director is part of the subterfuge. The mystery doesn’t come from the telling, it comes from the certainty that the filmmakers are withholding some crucial parts of the story.

Scorsese’s hallmark has always been intense realism, so the opportunity to squander an epic budget on psychedelic elements must have been attractive. It’s hard to imagine another film that would allow him to stage the graphic concentration camp shootout that is one of the best executed (pun intended) visuals in the film. The pretentious and CGI heavy images of fire and water homage European surrealism, and the extended flashback that caps Teddy’s story feels like it could have been lifted from an unseen Bergman work.

All that firepower is wasted on a film that perversely decrescendos instead of climaxing. Whatever cinema-historical references Scorsese set out to homage are best left uncelebrated. Perhaps an upcoming filmmaker working on a tight budget could have made a smart, claustrophobic thriller out of this material. Sadly, Scorsese and his unchecked ambitions have little to offer beyond unnecessary obscurity.

The best film of the year that you didn’t hear about (and should have) is Duncan Jones’ sci-fi flick Moon.

There were better films released in 2009 than Moon, but most of those were obscure foreign films that you weren’t going to see anyway, even if every reputable critic in America wrote you a personal letter explaining why you should see it. Those films probably had war-torn orphans, three hour running times, and deep things to say about the ethereal nature of the human soul. So let’s simplify things and pretend those other movies really don’t count for this award. (Really, they don’t. I didn’t see any pretentious three hour foreign films that were any better than Moon, anyway. And since this is my blog, we go by my rules. If you want to nominate something else, feel free to list it in the comments.)

Moon is a tidy little package, clocking in at what feels like a brief 100 minutes. It’s a simple story, free of pretentions, and yet it has plenty to say about the ethereal nature of the soul.

The story is simple. Sam (excellently played by Sam Rockwell) is working alone on the far side of the moon. He’s in the tail end of a three year gig, operating a mining facility. He’s alone except for GERTY, the wise and omnipresent robot who controls the facility. Then he has an accident and he’s rescued by… himself.

Each man believes the other to be the clone, and the argument over who is who -and more importantly, who gets to go home at the end of the tour – unfolds in ways both straightforward and surprising.

Steeped in the production design of classic science fiction movies of the 1970’s, the film deliberately evokes 2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running, and Alien. What’s delightful about Moon is that every time it teeters on the edge of becoming a predictable genre flick, it gently curves into new and surprising territory. The biggest spoiler for the film is not the identity of Sam’s rescuer, but the knowledge that it’s not a slasher flick, nor a predictable horror flick. The second half of the film is coyly suspenseful, building tension with strong, concise storytelling. There are no aliens leaping out of the dark. The omnipresent robot (slyly voiced by Kevin Spacey) doesn’t turn out to be malignant technology run amok. There’s no labored twists, just smooth storytelling. And every time you have the story figured out, writer/director Duncan Jones finds a nuance that keeps you thinking and a left turn to keep you engaged.

Sam Rockwell handles the dual role with a deceptive ease, and since he’s the only person onscreen for 97% of the film, it’s easy to overlook what a nuanced performance he gives. He’s always had a slacker’s ease on screen, acting as if he was a half-second behind the rest of the world. Watching him embody that age-old dilemma of “What would happen if I met myself at a party? What if I thought I was an asshole?”, that slight delay speaks volumes. Watching Sam try to figure himself out is some of the most effective on-screen philosophizing as you’ll find this year.

The effects work is satisfyingly tactile. Shot for about the same budget as The Hurt Locker, Moon unfolds in a world every bit as tactile. Unlike the tiresomely digital cartoons of Avatar, the questions about human nature have an immediacy to them and a quiet depth that will have you thinking about them long after the story has unfolded. In space, sometimes a contemplative whisper is more effective than a scream.

Moon is now available on DVD and via Netflix. Go put it in your queue. You’ll be glad you did.

In fact, except for The Hurt Locker, there wasn’t another movie I saw all year that lingered in my thoughts the way A Serious Man did. It’s one part Barton Fink and one part The Big Lebowski, and a wholly original creation. It’s the story of Larry Gopnik – a physics professor and a family man. All his life, he’s tried to be a mensch, and suddenly in middle age, his whole world is falling apart. His tenure is threatened. His wife wants a divorce. His wife’s lover wants Larry to move out. His daughter is stealing money from his wallet. His son is only interested in getting high and watching TV. His neighbor may or may not be trying to seduce him. And one of his students may or may not be bribing him for a better grade.

Larry wants to be a good man, a serious man. Since he’s also a religious man, he turns to a succession of rabbis to help him understand the trials that Hashem (the Hebrew term for G-d) is placing before him.

A Serious Man is the first comedy that’s equally inspired by the biblical Book of Job and the paradox of Schroedinger’s Cat. It’s either the most whimsical movie to ponder the relationship between mankind and the Almighty, or it’s the grimmest comedy ever made. The stroke of genius here is that is it simultaneously both of those things, and neither of them.

The story of Job is an attempt to present the quandry of why bad things happen to good people. It’s a parable meant to help people contemplate the paradox of having faith even when the evidence contradicts it. The thought experiment of Schroedinger’s Cat is even more maddening in its insistence that reality exists in contradictory states all the time. The way the Coen brothers combine the two, a stream of profound, and profoundly unanswerable questions flows forth. Is G-d out there, watching over us? Does he care? Do our good works appease him? Or do they make no difference? For that matter, what is goodness? Is it good to suffer if G-d commands? Or does G-d not even notice?

Broadway actor Michael Stuhlbarg tries to be A Serious Man

Movies by the Coens usually traffic in some levels of ‘unknowability.’ Some of their strongest detractors always hammer away at the aloof and elusive nature of their films. I had this complaint about No Country For Old Men:

The Coens create perfect but perfectly airless pieces of cinema. They’re unsympathetic, emotionally distant observers disinterested in sharing their inside jokes with the world at large

And that movie won the Oscar for Best Picture.

A Serious Man is a vastly better film. The Coens’ penchant for cryptic, emotionally distant storytelling finds a perfect subject in the unknowable nature of G-d. The film begins with a ten minute prologue set in a turn-of-last-century Polish shtetl. A husband tells his wife about a man he invited over for dinner. The wife replies in horror that the man died months ago, and the husband invited a demon. When the guest arrives, the wife stabs the man and he stumbles out into the snow never to be seen again. Who is the demon? The wife who stabs a man unprovoked, or the mysterious guest? Was he human? Was he a demon?

That’s the perfection of A Serious Man. Like Schroedinger’s Cat, every trial that Larry faces, every oblique event that the filmmakers present is an embodiment of that paradoxical unknown. Is this a test from G-d? Or is this happening at random? It’s surrealism of the mundane.

Don't you want somebody to love?

The funniest scene in the movie follows Larry’s son at his Bar Mitzvah. After the Torah reading, his son – who is stoned out of his gourd – is granted a brief audience with the wizened, senior Rabbi Marshak who rarely speaks. Larry’s son is suffering from ’stoner’s paranoia’, and Marshak, an impossibly old man, slowly leans forward to present his precious few words of wisdom. In a gravelly voice, he cryptically intones “When the truth is found… to be lies…” (which are the opening lyrics to Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody To Love”) while sliding a confiscated transistor radio back to the boy.

Larry’s son stares at the Rabbi with slack-jawed incoherence and gratitude. Is this wisdom from ancient Torah scholars? Is the Rabbi into Jefferson Airplane? Is this what all the hype of becoming a man is about? Is this mystically incomprehensible, or just a polite pat on the head? It’s weird, oblique, almost pointlessly unknowable, and so precisely controlled that it’s hysterically funny.

Everything is a question without an answer, and when you question the question, you only get more questions. The rabbis that Larry turns to for help offer little solace. The junior rabbi is useless. Marshak won’t speak to him. And Rabbi Nachtner only increases the paradoxes with a bizarre tale of G-d possibly planting messages in a goy’s teeth. Larry has to angrily deny that he ordered the Santana album “Abraxas” from the Columbia Record Club, but knowing that Abraxas is a Gnostic term for G-d, is Larry denying that he bought a record, or denying the role of G-d in his life? Which is it? Are the filmmakers presenting clues to the existence of G-d? Or just a massive, improbable set of coincidences?

Movies are a medium for concrete answers, they work best in presenting clearly designed, specific truths. Creating a satisfying film where the very heart of it is an impenetrable non-answer is an incredibly difficult proposition. Very few films achieve this – Lynch’s Lost Highway is probably the most notable, and to a lesser extent so does Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.

That’s appropriate, because with A Serious Man, the Coen Brothers become the first filmmakers to stake a legitimate claim at being Kubrick’s true heirs. It’s unfortunate that the Coen’s won their Best Picture Oscar for the completely inferior No Country For Old Men because A Serious Man is the high water mark of their career to date.

If you enjoy being smothered to death with a pillow, then Traitor is the movie for you. Ostensibly a thriller about an American Muslim who has gone deep undercover into an Islamic terrorist cell, it turns into a case study for the failure of good intentions.

 

The film follows Samir (Don Cheadle), a vagabond arms dealer/bomb maker from a Yemeni prison to the heart of a conspiracy to bomb the United States. Cheadle speaks in a tortured whisper and has a mortally wounded sense of morality, which can only mean he’s a double-agent. He is a deep, deep undercover operative – so deep that only his handler Jeff Daniels (still sporting his haircut from Dumb & Dumber), knows that Samir is really fighting for the good guys. Hot on his trail is the pointy-jawed Guy Pearce, an upright FBI super-agent who is slightly less complex than Dudley Do-Right.

 

Everybody whispers and looks anguished all the time except the terrorists, who sip fine champagne and elude the police in stylish trenchcoats and cowl-necked sweaters. Nobody seems to be enjoying themselves here – there is neither the grim satisfaction in victory or the crushing defeat of failure.

 

Traitor is far less than the sum of its parts. The production is full of reasonably talented people, all putting forth their best effort, and the film’s failure to be even remotely interesting is puzzling. Is it the sub-par music? The dialogue that is less interesting than the average Law & Order? Or is it the pedestrian direction, that labors so hard to be interesting, but winds up feeling like a claustrophobic movie-of-the-week?

 

Writer/director Jeffrey Nachmanoff has crafted a film that feels like an overly serious child begging for a place at the adult’s table. Instead of bravely plunging into the issues at hand, Nachmanoff plays dress-up with the war on terror, stridently trying to imitate a serious discussion by making everything as stern and as somber as possible.

 

Don Cheadle can’t dampen his screen, so he settles for whispering and looking sorrowful all the time. Guy Pierce does his best Donnie Wahlberg impersonation as a dedicated FBI agent hot on Samir’s trail. Everybody is eloquent and convincing, and utterly dull at the same time. The film’s lone daring stroke of imagination is hammered into submission with fractured and rhythmless direction.

 

The bottom line here is that the quagmire of terrorism and modern warfare just aren’t ready for cinematic treatment yet. There hasn’t been a commercially successful project about the Iraq war, or the concurrent war on terrorism. The list of failures is long and include many illustrious filmmakers:

 

In The Valley Of Elah

Stop-Loss

Standard Operating Procedure

Redacted

Rendition

Vantage Point

The Kingdom

Lions For Lambs

Grace Is Gone

 

None of them are good; almost all of them are awful. Only Errol Morris’ intricately researched Standard Operating Procedure and Vantage Point’s goofy, pretend heroics offered any experience that resembled ‘entertainment’.

 

There’s a good reason that we haven’t seen a good film about the modern war on terrorism – we’re mired too deeply in it. We’re in the proverbial ‘fog of war’, fighting a stateless enemy and our own discontent with the political process. History can’t be appreciated while it is still being written; and morally provocative tales can’t be told until there is a collective judgement on the outcome.

 

It took six years after the Vietnam war ended for the first truly powerful film to be made about the experience – 1978’s The Deer Hunter. It took another year for Coppola’s Apocalypse Now to dramatize the deep moral contradictions that disturbed the country during the war itself. Cinema as an art is a reflective, post-morteming process. Making films about the war on terror is like building a sand castle while the tide is rolling in. Halfway through the process, the foundation is already washed away.

 

Sometime in 2011, we’ll get the first searing, definitive cinematic depiction of the current war in Iraq. The ensuing years will bring films that will start to effectively plumb the depths of the moral quagmire that we’re currently stuck in. By that time, Traitor will be washed out to sea and long forgotten.

 

 

Frenchman Philippe Petit is a hyperactive Frenchman who’s as self-affirming as a kindergarten teacher; all wide-eyes and excited gestures. He sees an artist’s rendering of the towers in a newspaper while waiting for a filling, and is so smitten that he steals the image and rushes home to begin planning. To him, crossing the towers is an inexplicable poetry, and by the time he is on the wire between the towers, we will come to understand it intimately.

The footage of Petit walking between the spires of Notre Dame and crossing the bridge at Sydney Harbor is incredible. The wire disappears into the film grain, leaving just the shape of a man, floating high overhead. There’s no pretension of being a magic trick, just the incredible grace of a man floating gently in the air. The clean geometry of the still photographs, too, are marvelous. The balancing pole, the wire, and the girders of the World Trade Centers intersect at hard right angles while Petit stands in the center of the axes, triangulating himself into the center of attention.

Making a documentary about an event where the outcome is widely known is a high-wire act unto itself. When the ultimate question of “does he succeed?” can’t be used to generate any drama,  most producers and directors plunge into a mode of ponderous examination, pouring pretension onto the smallest details to inflate their subject into legend. The other popular approach is to cast the story as a hand-wringing fight against the odds. Both approaches turn their stories into leaden sculptures, sluggishly miring the action under a microscope as they attempt to pin it down with an exacting examination.

Director James Marsh veers against the grain, framing the story as an Ocean’s 11 style heist flick. The opening is immediately gripping, and he keeps the action constantly aloft. The story sprawls and rambles but never sags. We are mercifully spared any Herzog-ian pronouncements about the metaphoric implications of walking a tightrope, instead we are treated to the dazzling sight of a man walking on thin air. The bulk of the story covers the breathtaking ingenuity it took to conceive, engineer, and execute Petit’s dream. His gambits to recon the towers are laugh out loud funny, and the archive footage of the towers being constructed are a startling reminder of how majestic they were on the New York skyline.

After a summer of grim, Dolby-steroid inflated grindfests, Man On Wire is a welcome change of pace. (The gramatically incorrect title is from the police report after Petit’s arrest – it took the Manhattan D.A. quite some time to figure out what exactly to charge him with.) If you met Petit at a dinner party, you might want to punch his lights out. But in his element, floating in the sky, Petit is an enchanting story teller. Nothing else you’ll see this summer will linger with you quite as long; if this film is playing somewhere near you, go see it.

Today is that day, gentle reader.  Today is the day I write of my cinematic disappointment.
Stoner films have a proud history, though not a credited or cultured one.  Cheech and Chong are the collective Orson Welles of marijuana films, giving one an idea of the quality stoner films aspire to.  Unfortunately, Pineapple Express fails to live up to even this low-bar ideal.

The best part about Pineapple was the fight scenes and the car chases.  Always fun and riveting.  Unlike the jokes.  Yes, I expected jokes about marijuana use, those who sell and those who buy; those who scold and those who support.  I hoped that they would be funny to people who didn’t habitually smoke, but I hoped in vain.  And then… the classic homosexuality jokes.  Remember that part in Austin Powers where, in silhouette, it looks like Heather Graham was pulling things out of Austin’s posterior?  The humor in Pineapple doesn’t climb much higher than that.
The casting was great.  Seth Rogen plays his recurring role of “loveable loser,” James Franco of Spiderman fame, pulls off an extremely believable and likewise loveable small-time drug pusher Saul.  Danny McBride was, at the very least, performed a decent role as white-trash dealer Red.  It seems McBride has just jumped into the scene magically, and in the past two years has been in some big comedies, such as The Foot Fist Way, Hot Rod, and even Tropic Thunder.  He’s even set to star in his own film, East Bound and Down, as a failed major-league athlete teaching physical education.  He’s an entertaining actor, not sure if he deserves his own films yet.  Gary Cole, that great character actor, also plays an inept but vicious villain.
Brief summary: Dale Denton (Rogen), a 24 year old legal processing servant dating an 18 year-old high school girl (beautiful blond Amber Heard,) witnesses a murder while on the job and smoking an extremely rare strain of marijuana, the titular Pineapple Express.  He escapes, but is soon tracked down by the crime boss behind the murder, who is the only supplier of Pineapple Express in the city.  The plot soon unfolds into a huge drug war, and in the middle is Dale, his dealer Saul (Franco), and Saul’s dealer, the indelible Red (McBride).  In the end, a lot of people die.
The most intelligent part of this film is the discussion of the Drug War in regards to marijuana.  The acts of Dale and his friends, while moronic and silly, are relatively harmless compared to the extreme violence that the battle over marijuana trafficking promotes.  Rogen, Judd Apatow and Evan Goldberg, the writers, pose a question to the audience: Wouldn’t the world be a better place if marijuana was legalized?  Wouldn’t it be just a little safer if there was one less drug for criminals to kill each other over?  Indicted in this plot is the government, of course, for criminalizing the use of the drug because it makes the users question the government.  Paranoia in marijuana users?  Shocking.  Barring the government “reasoning,” it’s an important discussion.
Overall: Skip this film.  Rent it when you and your friends are getting high.  That way it might be funny.

By Aaron J. Shay
My history with Ben Stiller is as follows:

1. Being exposed repeatedly to “Keeping the Faith” at Jewish Sunday school when they didn’t have anything for us to learn.  Decent movie, at least for the first three times.
2. Being forced to watch “Meet the Parents” as a replacement for a final in high school Advanced Placement English, where I would periodically have to excuse myself to hit my head against the wall to get rid of the pain.  True story, ask Mr. Balla of Bellevue Senior High School.  He probably heard the thuds in the hall.
3. Being completely underwhelmed by “Zoolander.”

That’s it.
Needless to say, when I got the opportunity to see “Tropic Thunder,” I was prepared to be tortured.  Jack Black has done nothing but fail to live up to his potential whenever I saw a movie of his, and Robert Downey Junior… in black-face.  There were so many things that could go wrong with this movie… Especially considering the fact that Ben Stiller directed it and had a hand in writing it.
Luckily, I laughed the whole way through and enjoyed this movie.  There may come a time when I’ll write a bad review, guys.  Today is not that day.
The summary: Famous action star Tugg Speedman (Stiller), classically trained actor Kirk Lazarus (Downey), hip-hop star Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson), hopped-up comedian Jeff Portnoy (Black) and newcomer Kevin Sandusky (Jay Baruchel) are set to star in the best Vietnam war movie of all time, based on the book written by a handless veteran.  The director gets pissed that none of them take it seriously enough, so he takes the advice of the veteran (who is on the set for one reason or another) and sends them into the jungle to learn a thing or two about real heroism and war.  During this controlled experiment, things go wrong in a wacky, unpredictable way and eventually Speedman is kidnapped by a gang of Myanmar criminals.  Or were they Cambodian?  Maybe Vietnamese?  The real question is, though, is this: Who’s going to save him?  His agent?  His director?  The producer?  The actors?  What will become of Tugg Speedman?

The pacing in this film is superb.  It’s short, as any light comedy should be.  The conflicts become more intense at proper intervals.  The dialogue is just funny, and the story is great to watch unfold.  There are great celebrity cameos (my favorite being Tobey Maguire), and the character revelations, while not revolutionary or shocking, are entertaining.
A curious credit: Etan Cohen as a writer.  Does Eton = Ethan?  As in one of the infamous Coen Brothers?  We may never know.

What we do know is that there are clear signs of Stiller’s involvement in the script, such as the classic gag “really white businessmen dancing to hip-hop in an awkward manner.”  How quickly does this get old?  Let’s just say is this way: Even Steve Martin couldn’t make it funny.  Been there, done that.  Sorry, Stiller.  No dice.
I’m going to make a controversial statement right… now.  I think the pacing in this film was better than that of “The Dark Knight,” which has been the cinematic darling of at least 80% of my friends since its opening.  Let’s face it, folks, the newest installment in the Batman franchise had at least three major climaxes.  Three.  That’s exhausting for the audience.  False endings piss us off because it’s condescending.  It’s dangling a carrot on a string.  It’s cruel.  I couldn’t tell you which parts to erase, because they’re all so good, but there was too much.

“Tropic Thunder” is not cruel by any stretch of the imagination, save for a few moments of awkward unfunny jokes.  The exposition is quick and efficient, done as a series of film previews.  Perfect.  It tells all the audience really needs to know about the identity of the characters.  The film brings up the question of the worth of a human being and how to determine it, which is still a big, topical debate.  The black-face was used, not only as a comic device, but also as a vehicle for a cultural statement, which relaxed my worst fear for the film.  Actors in the audience will enjoy the “Method” jokes throughout.
Downey’s blend of Mel Gibson and Colin Farrel was a great prod at “serious” actors.  Jackson’s ridiculous hip-hop stereotype was balanced wonderfully by his role as a foil for Downey’s black-face.  Jack Black pulls one of his best roles I’ve seen him perform, playing a combined satire of Chris Farley and Eddie Murphy.  Baruchel executes a great straightman, a seemingly recurring role for him.  And of course, Stiller does what he does best: Play a humorously self-centric idiot.
Classic war-movie cinematography, questionable sound-mixing, great characters and a wonderful ending give this movie a rating of “good.”  Not “great,” but just might be worth the money to see with a group of friends.

When it comes to the movies, is there such a thing as too big? With the inflation of expectations and ticket prices, audiences are demanding more from their movies than ever before. We want spectacle and quality; we want to be dazzled by the fantastic and touched with real emotion; we want movies to make us think while we shut our brains off for the ride.

 

The major studios are more than happy to pursue these paradoxical audience expectations, behaving like Microsoft coding a new OS when it comes to their tentpole releases. Ambition and bravado trump practicality, utility, or audience need. More graphics, more wisecracks, and more simulated emotions get shoved into screenplays until they collapse under the countless cross-purposes. Simply put, studios are reactive beasts, eagerly chasing after every audience’s critical whim in a desperate bid to please.

 

Meanwhile audiences are exceedingly quick to register their displeasure. Movies are too soulless, too unfaithful to the source material, too stupid, too grim, too vapid, too noisy, and not action-packed enough. If a summer movie doesn’t burn a metropolis to the ground while the hero cracks wise with an improbably hot love interest, we feel cheated. Yet, when movies do exactly that (such as the excoriated Hancock), we deride them for being pandering and implausible.

 

In short, the studios can’t win. We expect too much; far more than a fiscally responsible studio can deliver with a $180 million dollar investment.

 

Despite the impossibility of their very existence, these major studio tentpoles are cinema’s greatest windmills. The mad quest to serve every audience’s quixotic expectations is the Everest of filmmaking. To deliver one monstrously successful picture is the dream of writers and directors everywhere – the cinematic equivalent of throwing a no-hitter in the World Series or throwing a winning touchdown pass as time expires in the Super Bowl.

 

That sense of glory is what drives filmmakers to attempt the impossible. Once in a career they’ll succeed, and when they do, the result is thrilling. Writer and director Christopher Nolan faced those long odds with his Batman sequel The Dark Knight, and for what will be the only time in his career, he soundly beat them.

 

That’s not saying that The Dark Knight is a great film, or even a good one. It’s too frantic and jittery; in order to fit all the pieces together, everything is hurried. The timing of the release, however, is downright perfect, and in raw business terms, that’s all that matters.

 

The Dark Knight is one part theme park ride and one part meditation on terrorism. Nolan builds a rollercoaster ride that careens through the various facets of moral darkness. This is what the major releases are now, we buckle in and strap ourselves down while the ride sharply veers this way and that at an ever accelerating pace. The film flirts with the exploring the roots of evil, but will never be accused of having any real insight into the black. The whole story has a few very nifty turns, but they roar past with such velocity that you’re tempted to look behind you and figure out what you just missed.

 

In this outing, Christian Bale returns as Bruce Wayne, the gaddish playboy with the crime fighting alter-ego. His crime-fighting has inspired fear in the bad guys, and copycat (copybat?) low-tech citizens to take back the streets. As Gotham City nears a state of order, an agent of pure chaos arises to muddy the waters.

 

It takes a second viewing to really wrap your head around the plot nuances. There’s mobsters laundering money, some kind of bank heist, and a lot of dynamite. The story is too compressed in the first hour, and the subplot involving Chin Han’s renegade Chinese money laundering could have been excised without losing anything critical. The real attraction here isn’t Batman, Bruce Wayne, or a mute Chinese national, it’s the late Heath Ledger’s sensuous performance as The Joker.

 

His performance is the match that lights The Dark Knight’s fuse, and he isn’t in the film nearly enough. The Joker is the most complete creation that movies have seen in years, all hitching lisp and an awkward shuffle. His awkward, menacing, knife-to-the-mouth ambush of Maggie Gyllenhall’s character is one of the most squirm inducing moments in cinema this year; Ledger’s performance is all consuming. It’s a shame that the film is in too much of a hurry to linger with Ledger a little while longer.

 

In the haste to cram everything in, the moments of reflection, of real meaning, are lost in the turbulence. I could do without the pedestrian shoot-out in Hong Kong, if it meant having another minute of nuanced screen time for the Joker to push the maimed Harvey Dent into a pathological rage. Morgan Freeman doesn’t have time for gravitas when faced with Patriot Act-scale invasions of privacy. Nor does he have time to register shock or betrayal. The script simply loops a plot-noose over his neck and drags him onward.

 

When the Joker threatens to destroy a hospital unless a civilian is murdered, and as the city turns to savagery, we only see it blurring by like scenery on the highway. The darkness makes for pretty scenery, but the underlying message is as innocuous as a chain of billboards.

 

In this case, though, Nolan gets a pass. He is directing a phenomenon, not a thesis. He managed to distill mass audience tastes into a singular and personal vision, and the odds that he will ever scale the same heights are roughly equivalent to David Wells pitching another no-hit game.

 

Ledger’s performance, though, is the stuff of movie legends, and will be around long after the next incarnations of Batman come and go. Of all the major comic book heros, only Batman has a mythic depth. Equal parts Hamlet and The Count Of Monte Cristo, the Batman mythology eagerly lends itself to reinvention; the primal elements of the story are easy enough to map onto the fears and yearnings of any given era. This generation apparently wants it all – action, romance, explosions, and depth – all in :30 YouTube friendly clips.

When I got word of Guillermo Del Toro trying again to breathe life into the Hellboy franchise, I was puzzled. The first film was a mediocre attempt to blend Men in Black, The Mummy, and The City of Lost Children. The second film continues the visual mood but structures a story with a more genuinely epic conflict, pitting the world of Myth against the world of Humanity. The film also continues to plum the depths of Hellboy’s character: The first film explored his identity, while this new film explores the demonic hero’s place in Human society by presenting a tempting alternative.

The story: A long, long, time ago, humans were at war with the mythical creatures of the world for control. The mythical creatures, in order to beat the powerful humans, created an army of indestructible soldiers, the titular Golden Army. So merciless were these warriors to cause horror in the King. So he and the humans made a pact: mythical creatures would keep the forests and man would have every other piece of land for themselves. You can see where this is going. So, zoom to the modern day, where the son of the King returns from exile to awaken the Golden Army and exact revenge on humans for breaking the pact. Who’s going to stop him?

You get three guesses, and the first two don’t count.
The first thing to commend in The Golden Army is Del Toro’s use of puppetry. For this production, he acquired the services of the Jim Henson Shop’s artisans, a move which was vital to the production. At one point, the team of heroes enters a Mos Eisley style bazaar called the Troll Market, featuring many creepy yet intriguing wares and dark, mysterious denizens, such as a man with a miniature castle on his head. Del Toro has come to realize, as many of his viewers have, that costumes and puppets are still more real than computers, so he only uses CGI when necessary, such as when animating an army of seventy times seventy indestructible goblin-made soldiers. He leaves the trolls to be costumed.

Allow me to get the critique out of the way:

1) The human characters were constantly mistreated. At one point, Hellboy saves a baby. Upon handing the baby back, the mother demands, “What did you do to my baby?” A reasonable concern, I suppose, had Hellboy plucked the baby from its carriage. But that was not the case. He rather saved the baby from being crushed by the tentacle of a gigantic Forest Elemental. Having executed the Forest Elemental, the crowd then reacts angrily, near riotous. What? Excuse me, but he just destroyed a five story tree god that would have destroyed a majority of Brooklyn before being put down. And your response is, “Hellboy is out to get us?” Give humans a break, Guillermo.
2) Heavy-handed social commentary. Lots of it. There seems to be a pandemic of this in film in the past few months. We really need to rein this in. There’s nothing wrong with social commentary, as long as it’s not beaten into our heads with spiked clubs. The bit on environmentalism was blessedly short, but the unrelenting critique of “by the books” policy was simply too much.

3) They did not explain why the Prince was compelled to come back now, of all times. Why not during the Industrial Revolution, when some of man’s worst crimes against nature occurred, without a hint of remorse? This is a minor complaint: it is ham-handed social commentary, after all.

Having said that, more positive notes. Del Toro challenges the image set by Lord of the Rings by presenting a more mortal, unflattering, imperfect caricature of the Elf. There is a promise of a future film, even with the satisfying conclusion. The action scenes were magnificent, each one a test of Hellboy’s shortfalls. Noticeable plot-holes fixed themselves. Compelling, profound new characters introduced. Not all mysteries were solved, just the important ones. The exposition was brief, sufficient, and presented delightfully from a young Hellboy’s vantage point. Long live Howdy Doody.

If you liked Hellboy, you’ll like The Golden Army even more. If you didn’t like Hellboy, then give the franchise a second chance.
It was worth it to see a drunken amphibious humanoid sing Barry Manilow.