Tim's Trailer Talk, Vol. 4

Auschwitz



Chances of me seeing it: 0%. Unlike most people who expound at length on their hatred of German director Uwe Boll, I actually have seen one of his movies, 2003's House of the Dead, and I can say with absolute sincerity that it was one of the single worst movies I have ever seen in my entire life. The hype surrounding his awfulness is no lie, or even exaggerated. Even if I were to watch another Uwe Boll film, it would probably be In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale or BloodRayne, not creepy Holocaust porn demanding that I "never forget."

Chances of me liking it: 0%. Looks even worse than The Reader!

Beyond the jump: a festival of mediocrity!

Piranha 3D

About an hour into director Alexandre Aja's Piranha 3D comes one of the most insanely, unapologetically bloody ten minutes in the history of film. Until that point, the movie's kills are structured not unlike Spielberg's Jaws, violent and jarring but coming one at a time and spaced pretty far apart, but when the giant prehistoric piranhas descend upon the wet T-shirt contest being held on a float above the lake and the countless teenagers swimming nearby, the massacre begins. Dozens, maybe hundreds are devoured in minutes. What must have been tens of thousands of gallons of fake blood turn the sea red. It's a marvel of gore that achieves psuedo-B movie excess with aplomb unseen since Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror; a sequence destined to live on as a popular YouTube clip for all time.

This scene is more or less singlehandedly responsible for the film's enthusiastic reception among genre fans, but while I'd like to join them and I'd like to love Piranha 3D, I don't. It's not what's in the movie that bothers me so much as what's not in it. I'm not talking about stuff like rounded characters and human emotion that this sort of pulp doesn't demand, but more basic issues of pacing and structure and plain old satisfying horror. The wet T-shirt massacre is a grand set piece but there's still a fair bit of movie left afterwards, movie which does not live up to that scene's promise and actually ends up feeling dull, and the film's actual climax is so mild and understated in comparison that I had no idea I was even watching the climax until the credits suddenly started rolling, much left unresolved.

First off, there are characters who literally just disappear from the film. We don't see them die, we don't see them escape, they just mysteriously vanish. I've read that this is because they filmed death scenes and then didn't have the money to put in the CG to finish them, which I can sympathize with, but it doesn't change the fact that it plays ridiculously onscreen. More annoyingly, we briefly visit the piranhas' hive about halfway through the film, an eerie underground cavern deep beneath the water, and I assumed this location was being set up for a return trip during the climax, but no such luck. We never see it again. Made the trip to it feel kind of like a waste of time.

I also read a huge number of reviews suggesting that Piranha 3D is worthwhile because of all the nudity, but please. If a half dozen porn stars flashing their basketball-esque fake tits at the camera makes for great film, I could point you to hundreds of websites that create fine cinema each and every day. You'll never need to go to the multiplex again!

But I should say that, generic-looking porn stars aside, the cast of this film is in no way responsible for its shortcomings. Elisabeth Shue combines the roles of Roy Schneider in Jaws and Sigourney Weaver in Aliens as the town sheriff who battles the marine menace to save her children, and the role is noteworthy for being the most desexualized female action lead I've seen on film in a decade. I say this as a compliment. I mean, don't misunderstand, hot chick are awesome, but it was nice to see that in this day and age a woman can still kick ass on film while covered head to toe in a sheriff's outfit and without needing to fall in love or count on a man to save her. Piranha 3D improbably emerges, nudity, wet T-shirts and all, as one of the most feminist action films of 2010.

In addition to Shue, Adam Scott of the late, great sitcom Party Down is awesome as a badass seismologist, while Richard Dreyfuss puts in a cameo more or less reprising his lead role from Jaws and Christopher Lloyd channels Doc Brown with thrilling precision as a marine biologist. Elisabeth Shue of course played Jennifer Parker in Back to the Future Part II and Back to the Future Part III, so her scene across from Lloyd here functions as a little BttF reunion, particularly with Lloyd using Doc's exact inflections.

But in this case the whole is actually less than the sum of its parts. Lots of gore and entertaining performances give it some pulpy pleasure but I just didn't like the story and I didn't like the ending and I don't see myself ever watching it again. Nevertheless, the extremely low standards of the subgenre may still make it one of the top five "animals attack!" movies ever made. Jaws is clearly the best by a thousand miles, with Hitchcock's The Birds (not a great film as many claim, but still a very good one) being second. Piranha 3D's only real competitors for the remaining slots are Anaconda, Snakes on a Plane, and Jaws 2, so if you think those movies are awesome then maybe Piranha 3D is right up your alley, but if not there's better flicks to drop your cash on.


2 Stars out of 5

Tim's Trailer Talk, Vol. 3

22 Mei



Chances of me seeing it: 15%. It doesn't look boring, I'll grant that much, but it's never really a good thing if I can sit through an entire trailer and my reaction afterward can only be described as "...what?"

Chances of me liking it: 10%. I don't want to make any strong judgment calls here, because as I just admitted I have no idea what this film is about from its batshit trailer and movies have come out of nowhere to surprise me before and will again, but 22 Mei is not one I'm going to be counting down the days till.

Click bravely ahead for pulp, violence, arty foreign flicks, and at least one pulpy violent arty foreign flick...

Cop Out

Upon the lukewarm-to-awful critical response to his latest film Cop Out (19% on Rotten Tomatoes), Kevin Smith lost his goddamn mind. I won't copy and paste his entire rant because it's one of the most excruciating and embarrassing things ever, but I do want to highlight one particularly relevant portion. Smith says:

"You wanna enjoy movies again? Stop reading about them & just go to the movies. It’s improved film/movie appreciation immensely for me. Seriously: so many critics lined-up to pull a sad & embarrassing train on Cop Out like it was Jennifer Jason Leigh in Last Exit to Brooklyn. Watching them beat the shit out of it was sad. Like, it’s called Cop Out; that sound like a very ambitious title to you? You REALLY wanna shit in the mouth of a flick that so OBVIOUSLY strived for nothing more than laughs. Was it called Schindler’s Cop Out?"
Oh dear. I hardly even know where to begin. Frankly, this shit is far more interesting and worthy of criticism than the film itself. You could point out Kevin Smith's stunning short-term memory, lambasting film criticism when critical acclaim is why Clerks developed a following and ignited his career back in 1994. You could point out the hypocrisy of Kevin Smith guesting on Ebert & Roeper multiple times during Ebert's illness back in 2006, notably giving a thumbs down to Woody Allen's Scoop while proclaiming it "just not funny." He was right, of course, but, like, it's called Scoop; that sound like a very ambitious title to you? Was it called Schindler's Scoop?

Or you could simply point out that if Smith wants to alleviate criticism of his work then throwing a hissy fit is probably, short of making indisputably good films, the worst possible way to do it. Think back on your own life experiences: has a hissy fit ever once improved anyone's standing in your eyes? The answer is no. Critics love shitting on Aaron Selzter and Jason Friedberg (Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie, and Vampires Suck come out to an average Tomatometer of 3.6%), but can you imagine how much more they would love it if Seltzer and Friedberg didn't maintain their trademark silence and instead decided to piss and moan and cry about it?

Above all else though I find the general spirit of his words kind of loathsome. Not the part where he goes after critics, because lord knows I sometimes find film critics to be boring and predictable, with certain buttons to push (the Holocaust indeed being one of them) that will make acclaim spill out as surely as if you put a quarter in a gumball machine. But the idea that it's okay to make mediocre movies as long as they're intended to be mediocre is inexcusable, already sadly widespread, and needs to be extinguished, not have its flames fanned.

If you have the courage (and, let's be honest, stupidity) to trudge into message boards for soulless studio dreck like Clash of the Titans or Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen you'll find plenty of idiots who passionately feel that these films deserve acclaim and should be immune from criticism by the mere fact that they exist; that demanding more from your entertainment is inherently wrong. This view is a cancer to the very concept of worthwhile film that excuses, no, encourages studios to churn out unimaginative crap for a quick buck, and it's a shame to see a filmmaker that commanded as much indie cred as Kevin Smith circa the late 90s to throw his lot in with their ilk.

Perhaps the greatest irony of it all is that Cop Out actually isn't that bad. By no means great or even good, but I do think the parade of one-star reviews I read were excessive and almost certainly more hyperbolic than they would have been had the film come from some anonymous no-name. We'll put it this way: it's definitely better than Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

The story is about a cop played by Bruce Willis who has his rare baseball card he was going to sell to finance his daughter's wedding stolen, with the pursuit of it bringing him and his partner played by Tracy Morgan into conflict with a drug lord. But the story is irrelevant. This is a movie about a premise, not a story, and that premise is to watch John McClane from Die Hard and Tracy Jordan from 30 Rock bullshitting around and being cops together. Those aren't what the characters are named but they might as well be because that's clearly who Kevin Smith wanted them to play and the actors make absolutely no attempt to distance themselves from those roles. As an action-comedy the movie fails because Smith's action scenes have no energy or creativity, but viewed as a strict comedy I laughed a handful of times simply because it can be funny to watch John McClane and Tracy Jordan rub up against one another... if it doesn't just remind you that you'd rather be watching Die Hard or 30 Rock.

The film's pacing is somewhat slack. Tracy Morgan's character brings the momentum crashing to a halt every ten minutes or so with a terrible subplot about how he suspects his wife (played by Rashida Jones of The Office and Parks and Recreation fame, likable but bland here) is cheating on him. This subplot is never funny and makes the mistake of thinking we have any interest whatsoever in exploring the psyche of such a cartoonish, absurd character. Bruce Willis also has some personal angst about his strained relationship with his daughter, which isn't great, but at least it ties into the main storyline so it's not as tedious as Tracy Morgan's marital issues.

So there's a few shootouts, a few chases, clues are followed, Tracy Morgan acts wacky, Bruce Willis swears a lot, and yes, the captain asks for their guns and badges at one point. This film is not here to innovate and save for a couple of Star Wars references it contains none of Smith's personality, just pure, bland, made-by-committee buddy cop formula. While I was by no means offended (or at least I wouldn't have been if Smith had kept his mouth shut) it's certainly one of the least essential works of the year; even substantially worse films offer more to talk about. The fact that holding this opinion still probably makes me one of the film's biggest defenders probably says all that needs to be said about whether or not you should watch it.


2 Stars out of 5

The Top-Grossing Movie I Have Not Seen From Each of the Last Ten Years

Watching, discussing, pondering on, and writing about film is collectively by far my favorite hobby, and while I'm fine being out of the loop with other forms of pop culture it bothers me when there's a prominent dialogue going on about any film that I can't join in on. Maybe it's passionate fandom, maybe it's obsession, maybe it's a form of OCD, but every movie I haven't seen feels to me like an itch I need to scratch, even the ones I don't think I'll like.

But I can't see every movie, of course. That'd be an unrealistic waste of money and time. But I do see pretty much each and every "event" movie, the ones no one will shut up about, even if it's a Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen situation where most everything I'm hearing is about how much it sucks. I just gotta know what the deal is. Ergo, I was surprised while perusing Box Office Mojo's yearly gross charts to find that I actually failed to see the single highest-grossing movie of 2000, one of the only films along with 1987's Three Men and a Baby on that page I'm yet to get around to.

This got me curious what the highest grossing movie of each of the last ten years I haven't seen is, so I decided to do some (very quick and easy) research and post the results here.

2000: #1, How the Grinch Stole Christmas

Why didn't I watch it? The movie that inspired this post. I decided not to see it because it looked like embarrassing kiddy crap. It's not that I'm opposed to seeing family films — I love Pixar same as anyone else and I've also seen a fair number of DreamWorks flicks — but there's a big difference between a family film and kids film. This seems very much the latter.

Do I ever plan on watching it? Not particularly, although I have seen most of director Ron Howard's work and I suppose that if I wanted to complete his filmography I'd have to. I'd probably still save it for last though.

2001: #16, Dr. Doolittle 2

Why didn't I watch it? I don't think I really need to explain this one. It's embarrassing enough that I actually have seen the first Eddie Murphy Dr. Doolittle from 1998. The interesting part of 2001 is less the highest-grossing movie I haven't seen than the fact that I saw all of the top fifteen grossers in theaters, a record unmatched by any other year. Shame that about ten of them are horrible movies.

Do I ever plan on watching it? I emphatically do not.

2002: #5, My Big Fat Greek Wedding

Why didn't I watch it? I knew this movie was a hit, but I'm honestly a little surprised that it was this much of a hit. I don't really remember anyone I know talking about it, but then I was sixteen when it came out and heterosexual sixteen-year-old males rarely if ever gab about wedding movies. I suppose the subject matter just didn't interest me.

Do I ever plan on watching it? But I don't want to blame it all on age because I'm a lot older than sixteen now and the subject matter still doesn't interest me. I suppose I might watch it if they put it on Netflix View Instantly just to see what the big deal was. It would pretty goddamn low on my to-do list, though.

2003: #10, Cheaper by the Dozen

Why didn't I watch it? Kiddy crap.

Do I ever plan on watching it? No.

2004: #9, National Treasure

Why didn't I watch it? Honestly? I have no idea. I know the reviews weren't great but it's still pretty weird and unlike me to miss out on an Indiana Jones-inspired action-adventure flick with Sean Bean playing the villain, especially since I was living in a dorm directly across the street from a multiplex at the time it was released. Compounding the mystery, I actually did see 2007's Sean Beanless sequel, National Treasure: Book of Secrets. It was retarded.

Do I ever plan on watching it? Yeah, it's on my Netflix queue, hovering somewhere in the 20s or 30s.

2005: #9, Madagascar

Why didn't I watch it? Talking animal sitcom for babies.

Do I ever plan on watching it? Can't say that I do!

2006: #2, Night at the Museum

Why didn't I watch it? The trailers weren't offensively awful, but it definitely looked like one for the kids and only the kids. Funnily enough, it's directed by Shawn Levy, the same man who directed 2003's top-grossing unseen film, Cheaper by the Dozen. Shawn Levy is the grand maestro of movies I have no desire to watch.

Do I ever plan on watching it? If I had to I think I'd honestly rather watch the 2009 sequel Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. That one at least has Amy Adams in 1930s aviatrix pants as Amelia Earhart.

2007: #2, Shrek the Third

Why didn't I watch it? Shrek 2 left me cold and I assume this one was just more tired and redundant still.

Do I ever plan on watching it? Not really, but I suppose I'd rather watch it than Madagascar. Speaking of which...

2008: #8, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa

Why didn't I watch it? NOOOO

Do I ever plan on watching it? NOOOOOOOO

2009: #9, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel

Why didn't I watch it? NOOOOOOOOOOOO

Do I ever plan on watching it? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

The Expendables

The irony of the stupid and juvenile internet cult surrounding the thoroughly mediocre The Expendables is that the last movie Sylvester Stallone wrote, directed, and starred in, 2008's Rambo, actually did do all of the things that fanboys in denial are pretending The Expendables does. Rambo expertly mined 80s action nostalgia while amping the tropes of the genre into absurd overdrive, it had satanic genocidal villains very satisfying to see taken down, it was a festival of viscera and gore and geysers of blood and it was just a lot of sweaty, pulpy, supremely masculine fun. The Expendables may deliver a parade of celebrity cameos but as an action movie it's a turgid and forgettable affair, yet it's the one being lavished with all the hype that Rambo deserved and never got. Go figure.

Granting that neither elaborate storytelling nor rich characterization are key to a film like this, the plot involves a crew of mercenaries, the titular Expendables, being hired to fly to an island in the Gulf of Mexico and overthrow its dictator and the evil Americans he's helping make drug money. And yep, that's about it. The movie's focus is much less on the sparse story than on the many personalities populating it: Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Randy Couture, Terry Crews, and Dolph Lundgren as the Expendables, with Eric Roberts, Stone Cold Steven Austin, and miscellaneous brown guys as the villains, plus Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, and Mickey Rourke in cameos. "Holy shit!" you say, "That's a lot of manliness! Plus Eric Roberts for some reason!" And you're right! Too much manliness, as a matter of fact.

Because there's so many characters, screentime is spread thin, and every member of the Expendables except Stallone and Statham gets the short end of the stick, including Jet Li, who despite being billed above the title is absent for huge swaths of the movie and spends no more than a couple of minutes total fighting (in shaky closeup). I say again, master martial artist and horrible English speaker Jet Li quite possibly delivers more lines of dialogue than punches and kicks in this film. What's wrong with that picture? Everything. The others get less screentime still, and outside of Stallone and Statham and Rourke in his brief, non-action appearances the sense of camaraderie in this group is nonexistent.

Also, Randy Couture straight-up should not be in movies. He may be one of the best mixed martial artists on earth and I heartily encourage him to continue entertaining his fans in the arena, but he has all the onscreen charisma of a dead fish, made worse by the fact that Stallone saddles him with an agonizing twenty-minute monologue (okay, probably closer to two minutes, but it felt like twenty minutes) about his cauliflower ears that I probably wouldn't even have noticed if the movie hadn't explicitly pointed them out. He then disappears for like an hour to emerge for the final showdown and you're left wondering why this "actor" is in the movie. He makes Stone Cold Steven Austin look like Laurence freakin' Olivier.

Since the much-ballyhooed action dream team cast turned out to be shockingly anticlimactic and the movie obviously doesn't have any story of note, one is forced to turn to the action in desperate pursuit of thrills and will find the movie wanting in that department too. For starters, the action is poorly motivated. The Expendables fails the "show, don't tell" test of fiction when it comes to its villains and fails it badly, which is really surprising coming from the writer and director of Rambo.

In Rambo, we first meet our villain Major Tint forcing Burmese civilians to race across active mine fields for his pleasure, most of them exploding in red bursts after which the rest are shot. We then see Tint and his men slaughter an entire innocent village, having nearly every man, woman, and child burned or bayonetted and the survivors of the initial attack either crucified, sliced up and fed to his pigs, or made into sex slaves. What an asshole, right? He's a a nasty piece of work and so when John Rambo starts fucking up his operation and butchering his men it's all you can do not to shoot to your feet and start chanting "USA! USA!"

In The Expendables, we're told a few times that General Garza is a brutal dictator who has his fictitious country of Vilena oppressed by fear and violence, but when Stallone and Statham fly in for a visit we see jack shit. We see people getting disappeared into the back of vans by Stone Cold Steve Austin and Garza's men try to kill Stallone when he pokes his nose where he shouldn't, but compared to the way Rambo established its antagonists we might as well be watching Teletubbies, ergo you neither hate nor love to hate the bad guys. You don't give a shit whether General Garza and Eric Roberts and Stone Cold get overthrown or not, it doesn't matter, and that makes the action meaningless and impossible to invest in.

So let's break this down to the most animal level, ignore the plot, ignore the characters, ignore the conflict, and focus on nothing but the action; the shooting and the fighting and the killing. It's passable. Unimaginative and unremarkable, with the highlight probably being a scene where Jason Statham beats up a bunch of dudes on a basketball court that might give you a brief, pleasant flashback to Transporter 2, but it passes the time. Stallone knows how to put lots of explosions and loud gunfire and dead henchmen on a movie screen, and the lengthy climactic sequence where all the Expendables roll up to Garza's mansion for the showdown, while unfolding with rigid predictability, will numb your brain into a marginally enjoyable stupor.

For some reason though, perhaps because Stallone was at one point toying with idea of making the film PG-13, The Expendables has like 5% as much blood and gore as Rambo did. The movie lulls you into a false sense of security by having Dolph Lundgren rip a man in half at the torso with a burst of minigun fire within the first few minutes, but sadly that is the absolute peak of gore for the entire duration of the film. I mean, what's the deal? The violence in Rambo was beyond the pale. Throats were ripped, guts were spilled, bones were shattered, and the rivers of Burma ran red with enough blood to form a new ocean. The action in the The Expendables is loud and explodey but so very sanitized in comparison. Your grandma could probably sit through it.

Perhaps the only thing that saves the film from a one-star rating is the already legendary scene featuring Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger meeting in a church. That Sly and Arnold never teamed up to make an 80s action buddy flick together remains a wound that will never heal, but this scene, while a bit forced and very brief (I doubt Arnold has more than two minutes of screentime), serves as a small band-aid. If you're a fan of the 80s it's hard not to grin, and it's among the few moments where the film achieves the the level of testosterone saturation that the ad campaign promised. It's destined to be viewed by millions as a YouTube clip for years to come.

Ultimately though, The Expendables brings absolutely nothing new to the table beyond a big collection of action stars, but when most of them are relegated to cameos I'm not sure that's particularly worthy of lauding anyway. For a film featuring so many personalities it has a strange, persistent lack of personality itself, with precious little wit and not a single moment that attempts to genuinely surprise or invest you. It's virtually bloodless in every sense of the word. If the fact that it's peppered with big guns and big explosions is enough for you to join in the film's bafflingly large fanbase, then, well, I'm frankly a little shocked you're capable of reading these words.


2 Stars out of 5

Tim's Trailer Talk, Vol. 2

127 Hours

Chances of me seeing it: 100%. Aron Ralston's grim, gruesome, and fascinating story is interesting enough to get my ass in the theater all by itself. Combine that with Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle and you got a movie I'm certainly not gonna miss.

Chances of me liking it: 80%. The irony of this incredibly kinetic trailer is that the movie is about a guy trapped by a boulder, a film Boyle himself has described as "an action movie with a guy who can't move." There's no denying that it's an interesting concept, but it's been said that Ralston is going to spend at least an hour of this film completely alone onscreen and it remains to be seen whether or not James Franco can carry a movie more or less all by himself. Tom Hanks was able to pull it off in Cast Away, but with all due respect to Franco who I have enjoyed in several roles, Tom Hanks is a much better actor than James Franco is. But this is all just nitpickings and musings. Boyle is a great director and if they stick to the viscerally disgusting events of what actually happened I'm pretty confident that this movie is gonna be a must-see.

Gemma Arterton and not one but two movies that start with the letters "Leg" after the jump!

Tim's Trailer Talk, Vol. 1

I have decided to start doing weekly round-ups and thoughts on recent movie trailers. I reserve the right to skip a week if there is absolutely not a single trailer of interest or if I'm dead. Obviously, the former is preferable, unless there's a trailer for a new Aaron Seltzer & Jason Friedberg project, in which case I'll go with the latter.

Black Swan



Chances of me seeing it: 100%. I've seen all four of Darren Aronofsky's films to date and he's yet to make one that even approaches being bad, not to mention that his last film The Wrestler was his best ever and one of the best movies of the last ten years. If ol' Darren can get me riveted with something I care as little about as math in Pi and wrestling in The Wrestler I don't see why he can't pull off the hat trick with ballet. I'd see it even if it got horrible reviews, which I doubt will happen.

Chances of me liking it: 90%. It looks much more along the lines of traditional Aronofsky weirdness than The Wrestler, with some bizarre body horror shit with Natalie Portman growing feathers (possibly just in her head, but with a filmmaker this crazy who knows?), so I'll provide room for the possibility that Aronofsky's ambition could get away from him. But The Wrestler proved that he tends to get career-best performances out of his actors and Portman gives a better performance in this trailer alone than the entirety of the last half-dozen films I've seen her in, and the movie looks visually beautiful, intense, creepy, and lesbiany enough that I think it's poised to be one of fall's most fascinating offerings. I'm hyped.

New trailers for Narnia, documentaries, mockumentaries, lousy horror movies, and more after the jump...

Green Zone

On August 19th, 2010, the Iraq War officially came to the most awkward and anticlimactic end in the history of American combat operations. It would be easy for the layman to entirely miss the fact that this even happened, both because 50,000 troops are remaining as a peacekeeping and training force until December 31st, 2011 and because the news made the tiniest blip imaginable in the media, spending all of a few hours on CNN's front page before quietly vanishing. The simple truth of the matter is that no one wants to talk or think about the Iraq War anymore — in fact, the war's most aggressive initial supporters seem today like the people who least want to acknowledge that any such war ever existed, which is understandable, because I'd be ashamed too.

But the Iraq War did happen, and Bourne Supremacy / Bourne Ultimatum / United 93 director Paul Greengrass made a movie about it called Green Zone, and the movie kind of bombed, making $35 million domestic on a $100 million budget, because no one wants to think about the Iraq War. "But wait!" you might say, "wasn't The Hurt Locker a hit?" And the answer is no, The Hurt Locker was not a hit. It made $16.4 million in America, enough to recoup its budget, but it was only a hit amongst critics and awards shows. In the grand scheme of things only about 1% of Americans saw it, because no one in America wants to think about the Iraq War, even in the context of an apolitical action thriller like Locker.

Green Zone's an even harder sell, because Green Zone is very political. Unless you focus entirely on a specific soldier like Locker did, it's nigh impossible for an Iraq War movie not to be very political. Maybe one day some filmmaker will make an uber-patriotic Iraq War movie where America rolls into Iraq to defeat the supervillain Saddam Hussein, conquers his armies and henchman, kills him in a badass hanging, then immediately rolls out and back home set to heavy metal music, but I'd say we're a good twenty years away from such brilliantly jingoistic revisionist history. For now we're stuck with uncomfortable flicks about how we went to war for oil and there never were any WMDs and our government lied to us like Green Zone.

But unlike Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer, where the liberal propaganda stuck out like an awkward and boring sore thumb, Greengrass actually manages to mix it into a fairly muscular action-adventure thriller reminiscent of Ridley Scott's Body of Lies. Shootouts and explosions aplenty, good guys and bad guys, lots of excitement and whiteknuckle tension.

It's 2003, and Matt Damon is in full-blown wooden badass mode as Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, like Jason Bourne but with less backstory and more political convictions, who becomes angry after taking his men into dangerous warzone after dangerous warzone to find WMDs that never quite seem to turn up. So with the aid of a journalist played by Amy Ryan and a CIA officer played by Brendan Gleeson (a terrific and versatile Irish actor who in this movie proves to have one weakness: the American accent) Roy Miller does some investigation and winds up in a race against Pentagon Special Intelligence agent Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinear) to reach an Iraqi general who can confirm that there were no WMDs before Poundstone has him assassinated.

The performances get the job done and nothing more except for Khalid Abdalla as Freddy, an Iraqi who through circumstance winds up becoming Miller's impromptu translator and who really engages us in his people's desperation, and Jason Isaacs as Poundstone's stooge Maj. Briggs. I've seen Isaacs as Lucius Malfoy in lots of Harry Potter movies and of course as the Satanesque British commander Colonel Tavington in The Patriot, so it speaks to his skill as an actor that I absolutely did not recognize him at all underneath his facial hair and flawless American accent. When his name rolled by in the end credits I was like, "wait, what?" That's a real actor right there.

The film's action elements inevitably pale next to the sheer intensity of The Hurt Locker, but while I wouldn't say this film is as good as that one it's still pretty darn good. A bit preachy, perhaps, if you consider pointing out utterly objective facts like that there never were any WMDs to be preachy, but it manages to mix its liberal fanfiction with enough Bourne that it stands up as a worthwhile work. I'm willing to bet based on its weak box office reception that we won't be seeing too many more Iraq War movies, at least not for a while, so you got plenty of time to catch up on the few worthwhile ones (i.e. The Hurt Locker, Green Zone, The Messenger, and Body of Lies).


3 Stars out of 5

Alice in Wonderland

The relationship between a film's quality and its box office revenue is a nebulous and fascinating one. It's tempting to argue that no such relationship exists at all, or, if you want to be really cynical and hone in on Independence Day and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, that's there's even a negative correlation. But that's not quite right, is it? I mean, The Dark Knight not only lit the box office on fire but was also one of the best films in years. The Lord of the Rings and Pixar movies are excellent and have no trouble making bank, and despite what some internet crybabies may claim, even current reigning champ Avatar is pretty darn good.

But for every one of these examples you'll find near the top of the all-time worldwide box office charts a handful of soulless empty spectacles, insipid star vehicles, inferior sequels that outgrossed their superior predecessors (and the exact opposite for the Harry Potter franchise, where the bland first movie remains champ while the series' best entry, Prisoner of Azkaban, ranks lowest), and a smattering of Ice Age, Shrek, and Twilight films. You'll be taunted by The Da Vinci Code and 2012 and visibly cringe as you notice that The Phantom Menace is the highest-grossing Star Wars movie.

But the single film that jumps out at me the most has to be Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, landing in fifth place. What did so many people see in this film? Is the Alice in Wonderland franchise way, way, way more beloved than I thought it was? Are people not sick of seeing every fantasy movie, regardless of how jarring and inappropriate it is to the underlying story, end with CGI armies charging each other? Has no one gotten sick of Tim Burton's forced, manufactured quirkiness after over two goddamned decades of it? Am I the only one who found all the dialogue about Alice's "muchness" to be beyond excruciating? How did a film with so little merit become one of the biggest moneymakers in the history of cinema?

What Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland resembles more than anything is the first Chronicles of Narnia flick if Disney's Alice in Wonderland vomited on it. Sure, there's some familiar Wonderland (or Underland, as they call it in this movie, but I'm not gonna type that again because I'm just not) sights and characters to be seen, but the plot about our hero getting drawn into a fantasy land, meeting weird people and talking animals, and finally joining up with the good guys to lead a fantasy army against the evil queen's fantasy army is pretty much just Narnia, and I already saw that movie and I didn't even like it that much the first time.

Alice herself is a frightfully bland and wooden protagonist who makes Jake Sully look like Charles Foster Kane (through no particular fault of actress Mia Wasikowska, who has been fine in other roles I've seen her in). She spends over three-quarters of the movie insisting over and over and over again that Wonderland is a dream when we already know perfectly well that it's not, so when she finally figures that out herself you don't feel any satisfaction at the character's realization so much as "thank god we don't have to hear anymore dialogue about it being a dream." She begins the film not wanting to be wedded to some boring dandy her family has set her up with, and ends the film... well, not wanting to be wedded to the same boring dandy. So she has no character arc to speak of, let alone a tangible personality.

Johnny Depp has the exact opposite problem, giving his Mad Hatter so much personality that you want him dead as much as any of his enemies in the film. Mostly Willy Wonka with a bit of Jack Sparrow and a smattering of Edward Scissorhands and Sweeney Todd in there, covered in Joker makeup, this is a truly, truly obnoxious character brought to life with one of the most jarringly overacted performances in some time. It's almost like Johnny Depp is doing a parody of himself. But I gotta give it to Depp; last year he starred in one of my most disliked movies of the year, Public Enemies, but himself was too bland for me to even consider for my worst actors list. In 2010, Depp has proudly earned his spot on that list. Congrats, Johnny, you made it!

The only hints of life in the proceedings come from Helena Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway. I normally cringe at Burton's routine nepotism, but his wife actually fits pretty well into the evil Disney queen role as the the Red Queen — don't get me wrong, she is no way an intimidating or memorable villain and you not for one fraction of one microsecond believe any of the good guys to be in danger, but Bonham Carter at least gets some playful moments that aren't overacted as hideously as the Mad Hatter's. Anne Hathaway's natural charisma shines even through gallons of white makeup and Burton's forced quirk, and she plays the good White Queen as flighty and possibly a hint crazy, making exaggerated queenly motions with her hands while talking that made me chuckle. Sadly, Mad Hatter has way more screentime than both of them put together.

As the plot tediously unfolds towards its ultra-generic fantasy battle conclusion and we're forced to endure endless dialogue about Underland (ugh) and dreams and Alice's muchness, all that's left to do is drown in Burton's CGI world. Visually it's a lot like Attack of the Clones, tons of technology and hundreds of CGI artists serving no meaningful artistic vision, but instead of at least getting to enjoy a John Williams score we have to sit through more Danny Elfman circus tunes. There's an origin story sequence that reveals how the Mad Hatter went crazy, because of course there is. Finally, they strap little old Alice up with a sword and armor and we march. Into. BATTLE!

I'll admit, the whole CGI fantasy army thing blew my mind when we first saw a tantalizing glimpse of it in the intro sequence to The Fellowship of the Ring nine years ago. I thought it was really, really cool, and 2002's The Two Towers was the ideal orgasm to follow up on Fellowship's sweet cinematic foreplay. By 2004's Troy I was over it. That's not to say that it can't be used well if we care about the characters behind the battle, but I didn't care about Alice or the Mad Hatter or the White Queen, so that's problematic, right? I mean, all three could have died and the credits rolled over images of the burning, ruined wasteland of Wonderland, and my thought process during said credits would have been "hm, I wonder if I should grab a burger on the way home."

So the armies fight, and it all comes down to the final battle between Alice and the CGI Jabberwocky, which has all the weight and drama of Harry Potter's battle with the CGI basilisk at the end of Chamber of Secrets, i.e. not much. At least Harry seemed intimidated; there's no indication that a battle to the death against a giant dragon is in any way whatsoever scary or difficult for Alice. Then Johnny Depp does a terrifyingly unfunny dance to conclude our Wonderland storyline (although you can see in that clip how Anne Hathaway is more likable in her half second of screentime than Johnny Depp is in his thirty), and Alice goes back to the real world and does the same dance in front of her family, because that's a conclusion to a character arc, right?

Granted, the movie is occasionally pretty to look at and, uh... I was gonna try to find another compliment to pay it, but nope. Flat characters, mostly lousy performances, boring and weightless CGI action scenes, self-aware Burtonesque quirk, and a score that you will actually forget as you're listening to it coalesce to make this one of the worst films of the year. If it's between watching one sequel to this movie or having to sit through all five remaining Narnia stories, then please, I'll take the Jesus lion and the White Witch and those stupid Pevensie kids over and over again, although the box office returns may mean my pleas fall on deaf ears caked in white makeup.


1 Star out of 5

Star ratings!

After two and a half years of writing movie reviews I have decided for the first time to add star ratings on the end of them. Reading the user comments on RottenTomatoes.com, I grew jealous of all the critics who regularly get death threats whenever they dislike a film, and realized the thing that most of them have in common is that they give quantitative ratings. Hell, I decided, I deserve death threats for my opinions about movies too, right? If star ratings are the way to achieve that lofty dream, so be it.

I am using a five star scale instead of the traditional four, because I would honestly prefer a wider range of ways to describe a movie as good rather than bad, and am eschewing half stars and zero-star ratings, because that shit's for cowards (and don't even get me started on sites that rate movies on a 101-point scale of 0.0 through 10.0). Five options, period.

— One star, in plainest terms, signifies a movie I would not recommend to anyone regardless of how much they may enjoy the film's genre, actors, or anything else. It's a somewhat broad rating that can be applied to everything from an incomprehensibly terrible, completely unwatchable piece of shit like Babylon A.D. to movies I wanted to like but just couldn't like Transporter 3.

— Two stars is for movies that, upon exiting the theater and being asked "so what'd you think?", you'd respond with any combination of a shrug, "it was alright," "it was okay," or "eh," and if someone else in your group loved it you wouldn't be offended enough to really argue the point. Fundamentally competent but unremarkable films, difficult to recommend to anyone but big fans of the genre.

— Three stars is for movies I can unambiguously say I liked and feel comfortable leaving it at that. Not timeless classics, but movies that stepped up to the plate to genuinely excite, surprise, amuse, move, scare, involve, or entertain me. Unlike sites like IGN where this rating's equivalent (6.0) is a dire insult that sends fanboys into a frothing rage, this rating is not something I give out by default. Two stars is default. Three must be earned.

— Four stars is for movies that I want everyone to see even if they don't care for the genre or the actors or the premise. The movies that energized my love for the medium and where I walked out of the theater with a grin plastered ear-to-ear (unless it's like a really good movie about the Holocaust or 9/11 or something, in which case I guess I should have my cheeks plastered with tears and tears).

— Five stars is for movies I deem masterpieces. Note that I don't mean that in a snooty critical way where a masterpiece has to be high art about infinite human suffering; a comedy or an action movie absolutely qualifies for this rating... if it's perfect. Don't count on seeing more than two or three of these a year.

I have gone back through this blog and added star ratings to every single movie review going back to June of 2008, so if you're curious how I'd rate anything from the past, feel free to check it out.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Love. That most lofty of human ideals remains difficult to describe, but whether it's for a person or a work of art, you know it when you feel it, right there in your gut. And I fucking loved Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. It's a film that appealed to my every comedic, aesthetic, and pop cultural sensibility with such eerie precision that I suspect director Edgar Wright spied on me personally via webcam for years before one line of the script was written or one storyboard drawn. Perverted, but, watching the movie, obviously true. It's not only the best film of the year so far but among the very best of the last five years, and I can't tell you how rare and how viscerally satisfying it is for the credits to roll on a movie and my first reaction being "I have to see that again!"

There's been quite a few movies adapted from video games by this point, none of them legitimately good (Prince of Persia took a noble swing earlier this summer, but still fell short of having merit), but the well of narrative movies not adapted from but about video games runs bone dry. Once, not long ago, all a retro gamer could do is watch 1989's longform Nintendo commercial The Wizard, a movie with kitsch value but little else that clearly wasn't made with any fire or passion from its director. But Edgar Wright does have the fire, he does have the passion, and most importantly, as you already know if you've seen Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, he has the talent, and Scott Pilgrim is now by a hundred thousand miles the best film about video games ever made. Retro video games, at that!

And this distinction is significant. Gaming culture tends to have a poorer sense of its own history than film, music, or literature — it's the only medium I can think of where products from three or four years ago are straight-facedly referred to as "old" — so to see a theatrically-released movie in 2010 that features music and sound effects from Zelda and Sonic and Final Fantasy, not to mention dialogue references to Mario and Pac-Man and even more obscure NES games like Clash at Demonhead, was unexpected. Blissful, actually. And far from being empty Family Guy-esque "hey, remember this!" asides, these references crucially inform the characters and the story. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is not just the tale of Scott Pilgrim but of an entire generation of young nerds that see life through the prism of nostalgic pop culture.

But I don't want to make it sound like retro video game references are all Scott Pilgrim has going for it. Far, far from it. Yes, I'd be lying if I said the film didn't win my heart the second it opened with the title jingle from Zelda: A Link to the Past, but the underlying movie's so terrific that that's really just the cherry on top. The story's pretty simple if you don't get into all the side characters: a 22-year-old Canadian garage band singer named Scott Pilgrim falls in love with a girl named Ramona Flowers, who has seven evil exes. So Scott must fight seven boss battles and defeat each ex in mortal combat. That's pretty much it, but the magic of this film doesn't lie in its overarching narrative but in its astonishingly hilarious script, incredibly creative editing, cool action scenes, and wonderful performances.

What this movie has in common with Wright's previous films Shaun and Hot Fuzz is its perceptive and knowing commentary on pop culture. Where it differs is in its astoundingly propulsive pacing. I'm not saying that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World will be nominated for best editing at the Oscars, because it won't, but it is the most brilliantly-edited film of the year, if not the last five years. Scenes move with sheer kinetic energy, flinging jokes and funny dialogue and gorgeous visuals at you with barely a second to breathe — dialogue will be missed because of laughter, I'm afraid — and that's when we're not in the thick of one of many incredibly creative fight scenes.

The purposefully jarring, funny, tangible way Wright transitions from scene to scene is difficult to fully describe without seeing it firsthand except to say that it humiliates movies like Sin City in how it evokes the feel of a comic book without just dryly copying the visuals straight out of one. But it's safe to say that out of the total number of times I've laughed out loud at scene transitions in any film or television show in my life, at least 50% of that pool now belongs to Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

I'm not a huge fan of the label "action-comedy," simply because it almost always refers to a comedy that has some halfhearted action thrown in there. This year's Kick-Ass was one of the few films I felt truly earned the moniker, and before that, shit, I dunno, Beverly Hills Cop in 1984? But Scott Pilgrim is here to not just earn the label, but take up residence at the top of the hill, perhaps never to be dethroned. The comedy is swift, surreal, irreverent, gleefully absurdist, deals equally in broad slapstick and character-based humor, and made me laugh as hard as Arrested Development at its peak, which is all I really need to say. That's rare enough as is, but fact that the fighting holds up its end of the picture too makes this film nothing short of lightning in a bottle.

The best part of the fight scenes between Scott and Ramona's evil exes, along with the way they evoke a rich history of fighting game iconography, is that they make no attempt whatsoever to contextualize the fights within a real-world setting. The movie doesn't end with Scott waking up to discover it was all a dream. We aren't seeing things though his video game-adled perspective. This is just very simply a world where everyone is a kung fu master and people throw fireballs, employ telekinesis, run with anime speed, and command dragons made out of sonic energy to the interest of bystanders but not that much more interest than an ordinary fight in our boring old real world would. It's wish-fulfillment but more importantly lets Wright cut loose with the full force of his potent imagination whenever it comes time for Scott to do battle. I wouldn't dare give away the details of any specific bout, but each is completely distinct and vastly entertaining.

Scott himself is of course played by Michael Cera of Year One fame of Superbad and Arrested Development fame. If you've spent time on any movie-centric internet message boards you may be aware that a certain bizarrely angry backlash has developed against Michael Cera over time despite his brilliant comedic timing and the unique energy of his onscreen presence. But I actually suffer from an extremely horrific disorder than affects approximately one out of every million internet-users where I have the mental capacity to form my own opinions without latching onto any hype, backlash, or counter-backlash movement and letting them tell me what I think, so I have no problem acknowledging his talent.

It goes without saying that he delivers all the funny dialogue as well as he always does when the script gives it to him (of course, even Cera couldn't save Year One), but he also sells the fight scenes. No, he doesn't look like much of a brawler, and has even said in interviews that he still has no idea how to fight and this movie's battles basically amounted to learning and performing dance choreography, but having seen both Scott Pilgrim and the muscle-laden-and-testerone-oozing The Expendables this weekend, I can tell you that Scott Pilgrim's action scenes are approximately ten thousand times more vibrant and interesting. In the end what a good movie fight scene comes down to is energetic filmmaking and choreography, not behemoth biceps on the actor performing said choreography, because sorry stud, however many muscles you got, you're still doing a dance.

But Scott Pilgrim's bench of talent runs deep, and Michael Cera isn't carrying this thing alone. Kieran Culkin manages to breathe unprecedented, hilarious life into the tired "snarky gay friend" archetype as Scott's snarky gay roommate Wallace Wells, while Alison Pill creates one of the funniest misanthropes in recent cinematic history as Kim Pine, the drummer of Scott's band Sex Bob-omb. Even characters with minimal screentime make the most of it, namely Brie Larson creating a magnetic femme fatale as Scott's ex and singer of rival band Clash at Demonhead, and Brandon "Superman" Routh and Chris "Captain America" Evans oozing delightfully cartoonish evil as two of Ramona's exes. Mae Whitman — who played Michael Cera's girlfriend Ann Veal on Arrested Development — also shows up and does great work, although in one of my few distinct disappointments with the film, no one ever refers to her as "...her?"

Despite all that talent I think that the theoretical award for my favorite performance in the film might have to go to newcomer Ellen Wong as Knives Chau, the Chinese schoolgirl Scott is dating as the film opens. She abandons every shred of dignity and self-awareness and flings herself into the role with abandon that rivals actors who have been performing on the big screen for decades, pining after Scott with emotional vulnerability that is alternately (if not simultaneously) hilarious and heartbreaking. With a fraction of Scott's screentime Knives manages to have the most moving character arc in the film, and I hope to see Wong have a long and successful career.

The one character I will admit isn't quite up to par with the rest of film in writing or performance is Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Ramona Flowers. Not that she's bad or holds back the movie; she's pretty and droll and snarky but the film already has these elements accounted for in spades and she has little character arc, mostly just being a walking plot device to create strife and kung fu battles for everyone around her. The female lead being flatly written is a very, very common flaw in movies starring men, but although it's not nearly as bad here as in many other romantic comedies I've seen this year alone, it's still undeniably present.

Altogether though, I truly loved Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. There's been a lot of recent films that successfully streamlined nerdiness into something palatable for everyone, like The Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man, and The Dark Knight; hell, the nerdiest franchise on earth was improbably made sexy and cool with last year's Star Trek. But Scott Pilgrim is something else, something impossibly rare: a movie that unapologetically speaks fluent nerd to the exclusion of non-nerds. It's a film for pop culture junkies, retro gamers, and Arrested Development fans. It feels like a cinematic gift just for me. That I'm gonna buy it on DVD and watch it dozens of times over the remainder of my life goes without saying, and I have to personally thank Edgar Wright for giving me such a damn good time at the movies.


5 Stars out of 5

Best Foreign Language Film Postmortem, Part II — A Prophet

(Be sure to read yesterday's The Secret in Their Eyes review first if you haven't yet!)

We've all seen prison movies and we've all seen stories about young criminals rising through the ranks. Both tend to be pulpy, the former a bit more so than the latter, but the French film A Prophet manages to mix the two with a dash of coming-of-age story and an unobtrusive whiff of racial politics to produce a rather terrific piece of work, frankly one of the best films I've ever seen in either subgenre.

The story begins with a scrawny, broke, illiterate, and terrified 19-year-old Arab named Malik getting thrown into prison for six years for hitting a cop (whether or not he was provoked or it even went down the way the police say is never specified). Malik tries his best to settle in and not get fucked up or killed behind bars but the movie quickly throws us the curveball when the prison's crime boss Luciani gives Malik two options: either kill a witness he shares a cell block with before he testifies, or die. So Malik hides a razor blade in his mouth then pretends like he's gonna meet the guy for prison sex and kills him in just about the most harrowing and bloody onscreen death of the year.

So Malik is now part of Luciani's crew, like it or not, and becomes a mafia errand boy basically because it's better than dying. He learns to read and write and makes a friend in prison and eventually gets twelve-hour furloughs for outwardly good behavior, during which he does drug smuggling and murder for Luciani while surreptitiously making contacts in the criminal world and developing his own network. The film takes its time, running 150 minutes as we watch Malik make the most of his prison sentence, but stays riveting, ending with one of my favorite final thirty or so seconds of a film before the credits roll that I've seen in a long time, a dialogue-free sequence involving a lot of cars that perfectly shows how full the circle has been come.

Much of the credit must go to lead actor Tahar Rahim. He only plays the character across six years but the changes to his hair and beard and the rougher look the makeup artists gradually give his face pale in comparison to the change in the way he carries himself. While remaining youthful his posture and tone and the look in his eyes imperceptibly shift minute-by-minute, transforming the scared kid from the first scene whose ass you're sure you could kick into a confident and intimidating crime boss by the end. Actors have undergone less transformation and character development throughout decade-long TV series, let alone single movies. It makes you wish there could be a sequel so you could see what happens to Malik over the next six years.

But maybe it's for the best if there isn't one. I've seen enough crime stories to know that what happens next would inevitably have to be it all crumbling around him, and if I want to see all that I'll just watch Scarface or the Godfather movies again. A Prophet is great entertainment simply because it's kinda awesome to watch this guy climb the ranks from the unlikeliest of places. Far from a stodgy "foreign drama" cliché, it's a bloody, tense, and occasionally even satisfying good time. Although it was released in France in 2009 I didn't see it until well into 2010, so I'm not gonna insert it into my best of 2009 list, but it's a sure bet for a high rank on my list this year.


4 Stars out of 5
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
The Secret in Their Eyes vs. A Prophet final verdict: I'm not gonna bury the lede here — A Prophet, hands down. The Academy goofed. Not badly, since The Secret in Their Eyes is a fine film, but it's just not as good as A Prophet. It's actually easier than you might think to compare the two since both fall under the genre umbrella of crime drama, Secret being a murder mystery and Prophet being a rising crime boss story, but in both cases the genre is merely the mask for a what boils down to character pieces about their protagonists.

Comparing their crime drama elements, A Prophet scores a knockout victory. I've seen characters working their way up the crime ladder before, yes, but only a dozen or so times. Murder mysteries on the other hand I've seen and read somewhere close to a thousand of, so Prophet simply feels less stale than Secret. It actually brings new ideas to the rising crime boss narrative by setting it in prison and making the star an Arab, but while Secret is a classily-shot and beautiful-to-observe murder mystery that doesn't change the fact that at the script level it's just kind of another murder mystery.

Looking to the character studies it comes down to performance, and as engaging as Ricardo Darín's melancholy is in Secret in Their Eyes Tahar Rahim brings fire and visceral emotion to Malik in A Prophet that Darín simply can't match. He doesn't come even close, really. Also, Secret spans twenty-five years while Prophet only spans six, and other than some gray dye in his hair and beard Darín basically gives the same performance in each time frame. Rahim meanwhile evolves from a puff ball to something made of iron before our eyes, and he does it without even needing any dye.

So why did the Academy go with The Secret in Their Eyes for Best Foreign Language Film? First temptation might be to hone in on Secret being a bit chillier and more elegant while Prophet is something raw and dirty, but seeing as the gritty, sweaty The Hurt Locker swept the whole damn show, even writing categories it had no business winning in, that's not quite right. No, here's the real thing: The Secret in Their Eyes is about an old man looking back on his life, while A Prophet is about a young man looking ahead to the rest of his life, and the people who vote for Best Foreign Language Film are, by and large, for lack of a better word, decrepit. Prophet was the victim of some straight-up ageism.

But as a young man myself (just one year younger than Malik at the end of the film, and I haven't even put in the first steps towards building my criminal empire yet!), I hereby declare A Prophet the true winner. A Secret in Your Eyes, you should FedEx your statue to A Prophet by this coming Friday. It ain't too late to set things right.

Best Foreign Language Film Postmortem, Part I — The Secret In Their Eyes

Months after the fact I've finally gotten the chance to see Juan José Campanella's The Secret in Their Eyes, the Argentinian drama-mystery-thriller-romance hybrid that somewhat unexpectedly went home with 2009's Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. I admit I walked into the theater with a bit of a chip on my shoulder, because I really loved the French film A Prophet and was a little miffed that this other random movie I'd never even heard of before Oscar night shut it down.

That's not to imply that I give a shit about the Oscars in any meaningful way. A quick glance at my favorite movies of 2009 reveals that I didn't regard The Hurt Locker as last year's masterpiece, and the fact that Chicago beat out Gangs of New York, The Pianist, The Two Towers, Minority Report, 25th Hour, Hero, Catch Me If You Can, and Adaptation in 2002's Best Picture race (the latter five not even being nominated) remains one of those horrifying realties that I can't believe actually happened, like the Salem Witch Trials or George W. Bush's presidency.

But hey, it's World Cup season. Competition between countries is all the rage right now! So in that spirit let's put France and Argentina head to head not on the soccer field but in the movie theater and find out exactly what went down Oscar night, stacking The Secret in Their Eyes and A Prophet up against one another. First I'll review each film individually then the judges (note: the judges is me) will compare and contrast and make their final decision.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
The Secret in Their Eyes is at its core a character drama dressed up in a mystery movie suit. A Buenos Aires criminal investigator named Benjamin Esposito becomes professionally and personally fixated on solving the 1974 rape and murder of a 23-year-old schoolteacher, a case which continues to haunt him into his twilight years in 1999. By themselves the murder mystery and thriller elements are executed with skill but little genuine grit or panache, playing out engagingly but much like several hundred other murder mysteries you've seen and read before.

But that's okay, because as the movie unfolds it quickly becomes apparent that the mystery is only the top layer of what is actually a character study of Esposito and all his obsession and melancholy and particularly his unrequited love of his department chief, a lawyer named Irene for whom he carries a torch for over a quarter of a century. Yeah, there's some clue-gathering and puzzle-solving and even a rather technically spectacular chase scene, but after the murder has been solved the movie continues on for another thirty or forty minutes probing deeper still into Esposito's psyche, particularly the older Esposito in 1999 as he tries to work out his pains and regrets by writing out his 1974 experience with the case in the form of a novel.

Lead actor Ricardo Darín does fine work as Esposito, lending the character gravitas, but always feels a bit emotionally distant, even when we see him in moments that should be of genuine grief or joy. I'd say that the movie is stolen out from under him by Soledad Villamil as Irene, who radiates one hell of a sexy mix of of feminine elegance and investigatorial competence, and especially by Guillermo Francella as Esposito's alcoholic assistant / partner Pablo. You don't expect to laugh much going into an award-winning foreign drama, but although he does do some dramatic heavy lifting Pablo is a surprisingly hilarious and droll character who made me guffaw several times.

Director Juan José Campanella (whose work you may be unknowingly familiar with even if you've never seen an Argentinian film in your life, as he has directed episodes of Law & Order, House, and 30 Rock) brings to the film beautiful lighting and classy camera work and frequent close-ups. It's visually intoxicating if occasionally a bit cold and overly mannered, like being in a fine art museum — a feast for the mind and the eyes that rarely raises your heart rate or invites you to truly engage.

The filmmaking showstopper is unquestionably a dazzling five-minute single-shot sequence at a soccer match a little past the movie's midway point, which starts out in the sky far above the city and the stadium and then cranes in close for a really cool sequence of investigation, dialogue, and then an elaborate chase through the stadium's facilities all without a single cut. It's not quite the long take in Children of Men's climax but it's just about the next best thing. I've heard a few people argue (usually in Children of Men-related discussions) that gratuitous long shots are a gimmick to captivate easily-impressed dumbasses, but I'm an easily-impressed dumbass, so that's alright with me.

The Secret in Their Eyes is a true visual novel. I didn't need to read the credits (well, actually, I couldn't read the credits since they were in Spanish, but you know what I mean) to guess that it was based off a book; I haven't seen a movie where it was more obvious in months. If you go primarily looking for a mystery that will tax and surprise you you'll be let down and would frankly be better off watching some of Campanella's House episodes, but if you feel like watching a gorgeous and moody character study with a rich vein of romance and a mystery thriller coat of paint then I think you'll be impressed. It may not be a flawless work of art but it is art, with something to say and passion and motivation behind it, which is a lot more than I can say for soulless product like Clash of the Titans or Alice in Wonderland or Iron Man 2.


3 Stars out of 5
Review of A Prophet and final verdict on 2009's true best foreign film tomorrow.

(I should also note that The Secret in Their Eyes is the first foreign film I've seen in months where there actually appeared to be someone else in the theater within a couple years of my age rather than everybody being three decades older than me at the minimum. But I guess she didn't realize it was gonna be one of them readin' pictures because she got up and left a few scenes in. Sex and the City 2 was playing across the hall, so maybe she just got confused, so confused that she mistook a bearded middle-aged Argentinian man for Sarah Jessica Parker for nearly five minutes.)

A Tale of Two Finales, Part II — 24

It's funny — for years I had considered Lost to be "real" television and 24 a guilty pleasure sideshow attraction unworthy of shining Lost's shoes, so I never would have guessed until a few weeks before their back-to-back finales (around the time we got the Lost episode entitled "Across the Sea") that 24 would end up being the more coherent, competent, and recommendable series by a pretty big margin. That's not to say that 24 is perfect and it's sure as shit not to imply that perfection was even a blip on the hazy horizon for its eighth, final, filler-choked season, but by and large I thought it did well by its protagonist and left behind a somewhat proud decade-long legacy of constant cliffhangers, gratuitous violence, sudden deaths, and absurd plot twists.

Also, the nice thing about 24 is that each season stands alone, as the overriding threat and mysteries and major villains are pretty well cleaned out every year. I mean, sure, you gotta keep track of big picture stuff like who's President of the United States, which main characters are dead, and where exactly Jack Bauer stands with CTU and the government, but unlike Lost where the entire series-spanning mystery was reliant on its eventually botched conclusion, a bad season of 24 (and there is at least one really bad one, the dreaded season six) can be seamlessly skipped and doesn't sour what came before — all this being a longwinded way to say that whatever silliness followed, season one of 24 remains a clockwork action thriller, one of the absolute best produced in film or television over the last decade.

But we're not here to discuss the first season. Not yet, anyway. Quite the contrary, let's get into the show's ending.

FULL SERIES SPOILERS AHEAD!!
It goes without saying that the resolution to the final season's running storyline, the all-encompassing peace treaty MacGuffin, was mostly uninspired, as 24's overarching plots tend to be. Federal agent Jack Bauer killed his way up a chain of Russians to discover who was behind the murder of his love interest Renee Walker and eventually found that the conspiracy went up to Russian President Yuri Suvarov himself (with evil former US President Charles Logan in on it too, naturally). So Jack grabbed him a sniper rifle, found a vantage point, and got ready to assassinate a foreign head of state on US soil — at the signing of a peace treaty, no less! I confess I was vaguely excited by this, not because I still hold onto some kind of Cold War-era grudge, but because Jack Bauer, annihilator of terrorists, ending the series as a wanted terrorist would have been some serious full circle shit.

But it was not to be, of course. Jack frequently steps up to the line but rarely over, and much like every time in the series that he threatened to maim and / or kill a terrorist's wife or kids to get them to talk or when he threatened to kill President Logan in season five, Jack was unable pull the trigger and instead turned himself in. However, he was able to encourage US President Allison Taylor to step away from the fraudulent peace accord and vow to bring Suvarov to justice, so that's awesome, except that I never cared about the silly peace treaty anyway.

But that's okay, more or less. You see, unlike Lost, a mythology-centric show whose writers and fanboys laughably tried to claim was "always about the characters" in the final season when they realized they wouldn't be able to satisfyingly or coherently wrap up said mythology, 24 really was always about the character of Jack Bauer (and to a much lesser but not negligible extent, his longest-running ally, newly-promoted CTU Director Chloe O'Brian). Want proof? Ask a random Joe who knows of but has never seen Lost to tell you about the show and he probably won't be able to tell you about Jack Shephard or Kate Austen, but he probably will be able to tell you that it's about a plane crash on a mysterious island. You know, the mythology. Ask a random Joe who knows of but has never seen 24 and he probably won't be able to explain the story of any specific season, but I bet he will be able to tell you that it's about an oft-torturing loose cannon federal agent named Jack Bauer.

And thus the final twenty or so minutes of the last episode, which got past the season's thriller story and turned their focus on Jack, mostly satisfied. Basically, government mercenaries took Jack out to the back of a building to kill him but just in time President Taylor called, ordered them to stand down, and gave Jack a head start to get out of the country (thus setting up the movie, which is indeed confirmed to be set in Europe). By itself that doesn't sound great but the writers smartly realized that the show's key relationship, the one fans really cared about, wasn't between Jack and the president or Jack and any of his field partners or romantic interests or even Jack and his daughter Kim, but between Jack and Chloe, and the show's last scene was an emotional goodbye between the two via satellite, with Jack thanking Chloe for everything she'd done over the years and Chloe blubbering. No, it wasn't among the finest human drama of the TV season but I sure felt more genuine emotion during that scene than I did during Lost's asinine final revelation.

Better still, former President Charles Logan, caught conspiring with terrorists yet again and with the authorities closing in on him, shot his right-hand man before turning the gun on himself. And in perhaps the finale's most subtly brilliant twist, Logan couldn't even blow his own brains out properly and instead wound up a vegetable — an ignominious and viscerally satisfying fate for Jack Bauer's longest-running nemesis.

The season as a whole was admittedly a lukewarm one, arguably second worst in the series' history behind the bafflingly awful Frankenstein monster of stitched-together reheated storylines that was season six. This is largely due to the presence of a really terrible character named Dana Walsh who spent the entire first half of the season wrapped up in a moronic, neverending subplot about being stalked and manipulated by her redneck ex-boyfriend, a plot so stupid we wouldn't have cared even if it had involved a beloved character from seasons past, much less a brand new one. Adding insult to injury, it all wound up moot and pointless anyway when she just killed all her subplot's supporting characters we had spent hours wasting time with, they were never mentioned again, and she turned out to be the mole inside CTU and was shot dead by Bauer several episodes later. But not nearly as dead as she killed the story's pacing and momentum every time she stepped onscreen. Dana was maybe the worst character in the history of 24, and that's saying something.

Beyond the contemptible Miss Walsh, season eight was mostly about some terrorists from the fictional Islamic Republic of Kamistan who planned to assassinate their leader for trying to make peace with the United States (at which they were successful) and set off a dirty bomb in Manhattan (at which they were foiled) before they got killed off and the focus switched over to the Russians above them for the final act. It wasn't innovative or compelling storytelling by itself but served as a sturdy enough clothesline on which to hang chases and gunfights and explosions and 24's trademark frequent, often sudden deaths of major characters.

That's 24's true legacy — its style. It's shamelessly style over substance. The stories were generally predictable, through-the-motions B-movie stuff about terrorists wanting to either kill or control the president and deploy nuclear bombs, missiles, viruses, or nerve gas in major US cities (outside of season five's absurd, brilliant, and hilarious twist of the head terrorist being revealed as the President of the United States of America), but it's the way these stories were executed that made 24 one of the best genre shows of the last decade; a show that was not only narratively and structurally ahead of its time when it debuted in 2001 but, looking at most of the bland and episodic fare that passes for action and thriller television right now, is still ahead of its time today.

24 is the highest evolution to date of 80s action shows like The A-Team, shows which had virtually no serialization, incredibly rigid and predictable episode structure, one straightforward plot at a time, small casts of characters with no turnover, zero meaningful risk to anyone, and no consequences. These shows are incredibly boring and frankly unwatchable today. 24 in contrast has tight serialization that demands your attention, new and different action unfolding in new and different locations every single episode (although there is admittedly a roughly recycled season structure from year to year), tons of stories running concurrently and intercrossing, a large and fluid cast with a high attrition rate totaling 42 main cast members across its eight seasons, and most importantly, real risk and consequences.

Yeah, the biggest overriding threat of each season inevitably gets foiled, but in the meantime main and major recurring characters get killed off constantly and often with very little warning (sometimes more than one an episode), presidents get assassinated, Air Force One gets shot down, a nuclear bomb gets set off in Los Angeles, bioweapons released into major urban centers, CTU has most of its personnel killed off in a nerve gas attack, Jack Bauer's wife gets murdered, and basically all kinds of shit goes down. This keeps the show fresh, compelling, and tense and keeps you on your toes while you watch (that, and the fact that about 95% of episodes end in an "oh god what happens next!" cliffhanger). If more action-adventure shows were to take their queues from 24 in this regard, then, well, I'd watch more action-adventure shows.

The first season, as I mentioned up top, remains the gold standard. It can be vaguely surreal to watch season one for the first time if you came into the show later on in its run, as it lacks many of 24's future signature elements — there's no loose weapons of mass destruction, no Islamic terrorists, the President of the United States never appears (future President David Palmer is a main character, but he's Senator Palmer at this point), no Chloe O'Brian, no Jack angsting about his dead wife, no "TELL ME WHERE THE BOMB IS!", and most strangely, no torture. At one point Jack threatens to shove a towel down a guy's throat, let it partially digest, and rip it out along with his stomach lining, but the guy still doesn't talk and Jack doesn't even make good on his promise. It's sort of a prototype season, and that uncertainty gives it a freshness and an experimental nature that future seasons just couldn't match.

Best of all, outside of a moronic three-episode arc where Teri Bauer gets amnesia because Fox didn't understand the show yet and told the showrunners they couldn't leave her unconscious in a ditch for three episodes like they had planned, there's no filler.

The biggest problem with every other season of 24 is right there in the title — twenty-four hours of television (or about seventeen once you cut out the commercial break time) is a lot to write every year, and it inevitably leads to the show bursting at the seams with filler, a tendency which came to a tragic head with Dana Walsh in the final season. Season one's most impressive element is the way it keeps almost everything on task, juggling countless balls with only the one amnesia misstep as it moves towards a hell of a climax.

Seasons two and three bring the weapons of mass destruction and President Palmer and constant torture that we know and love into the 24 mix and have A-plots nearly as exciting as the first season's, but unfortunately are held back from true greatness by the filler rearing its ugly head. Jack's daughter Kim Bauer and her run from her crazed babysitting employee is the culprit in season two and President Palmer's struggles with an angry billionaire campaign donor eat up screentime in season three. Season five is the show's second greatest. It lacks the relatively down-to-earth nature of the freshman season — in fact, this is pretty much where they abandoned all traces of realism and said "fuck it, let's go crazy" — but the glory of the nerve gas attack on CTU and the villains being President Logan and the guy who played Robocop cannot be denied.

The fourth, seventh, and eighth years are the show's weaker efforts (and the less said about the putrid season six, the better). Some 24 fans argue that season four is better than season seven, but they're mistaken, because at least season seven shakes things up a little by moving the action from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. (the first time the show left California outside of a few season three episodes in Mexico and the TV movie set in Africa) and bringing Jack Bauer's former closest ally Tony Almedia back as a villain. Season four is amusing pulp but about when the Islamic terrorists and nuclear missiles in LA started to get a little stale, and is also the only season where the show's political content actually made me wince.

Much was made through 24's run of the show's perceived right-wing bias, mostly due to the parade of nonstop torture to make bad guys talk and the fact that the show's creator, Joel Surnow, is indeed a right-winger who would later, after leaving 24, go on to create the howlingly idiotic, pathetic, laughable, and swiftly cancelled 1/2 Hour News Hour, a "conservative version" of The Daily Show minus all the wit, humor, and insight. It got to the point where right-wing forums and bloggers pretty much adopted 24 as "their" show and real-life politicians were pointing to the fictional scenarios within as justification for torture and dropping "who would Jack Bauer vote for?" into their stump speeches.

But even as someone who generally doesn't stress too much over the political nuances of fiction that isn't explicitly political I admit being uncomfortable in 24's fourth season when villainous Osama bin Laden stand-in Habib Marwan released his evil human rights attorneys — yes, you heard me, his evil human rights attorneys — to stop CTU from torturing bad guys, and it was portrayed as a grand moment when Jack Bauer managed to subvert them to heroically torture again (getting the information he needed to save America from nuclear annihilation after about twenty seconds of breaking fingers, of course).

I don't know if the passing of showrunning duties from Joel Surnow to Howard Gordon changed the show's tone or if they simply decided they needed to balance the scales, but season five threw off some suspicion of 24 being right-wing propaganda by making the big bad Republican President Charles Logan, who had facilitated terrorist attacks on American soil to frame another country so that he could start a war to secure oil pipelines. There seemed to be a little bit less torture after this point; as a matter of fact in season six CTU tortured the wrong person, Nadia Yassir, a Muslim woman no less, who would go on to become Director of CTU Los Angeles by the end of the day.

There was also an interestingly feminist bent to season eight. Sure, Renee Walker got gunned down as soon as she had sex like she was in an 80s slasher flick, but all three of the season's major factions — the United States, the Islamic Republic of Kamistan, and CTU New York, the latter two of which were headed by men at season's start — wound up under command of women by the finale: President Allison Taylor for the US, Dalia Hassan for the IRK, and Chloe O'Brian for CTU. For such a manly and macho show, I thought that was kind of neat.

So, wrapping the series up: if you haven't seen it, would I recommend you watch the entirety of 24? No, not really. I wouldn't subject the sixth season of 24 to anybody; it's almost as bad as the sixth season of Lost. But narrowing things down, would I recommend you watch the first season? Hell yeah, even if you find the show's political content repellant and have no intention of getting wrapped up in a near 200 episode-long narrative. It's awesome; pure crackerjack entertainment. How far you want to go beyond that is entirely your call, but it's pretty easy to get addicted and keep going and going, even if you do it while rolling your eyes, groaning at, and fast-forwarding through some of the moronic subplots. And hey, if you barrel straight through to the end, I think you'll be relatively satisfied by the finale, as I was.

Of course, whether or not you even consider this the "real" finale is pretty subjective. For one, the showrunners had every intention to return for a ninth season until they were informed right before shooting the final two episodes that they were cancelled due to falling ratings and soaring budget, so everything in the last episode was planned about a week in advance (which makes the fact that it far surpassed the Lost finale, which had its date set for three years, all the more sad and hilarious). More importantly, the 24 big screen movie which continues Jack Bauer's story from the end of season eight is not only announced but well into preproduction, with the script written and everything, so this is, at best, an impromptu psuedo-finale.

I'm definitely nervous about the 24 film. The 2008 TV movie 24: Redemption where Jack Bauer went up against African dictator Benjamin Juma was set in real-time just like the show's regular episodes, being a two hour-long representation of two hours, but the upcoming theatrical film has been announced to be a feature-length representation of a 24-hour day, the first time in 192 episodes (plus miniature prequels, interquels, side-stories, and the TV movie) that 24 has thrown out its signature real-time format.

This could free them up or it could be an absolute fucking disaster. Far too many sure bets as of late, like Iron Man 2, have wound up disappointing for me to assume that the film adaptation of a series that has fucked up so many times in the past will be good. Or even watchable. I'm not concerned about filler this time around but I am concerned that it's just gonna be a stupid and generic cookie-cutter dime-a-dozen action flick devoid of any substance or originality. Not that I wouldn't be thrilled to be proven completely wrong, though. My only specific wish is that they bring back Mia Kirshner as Mandy to be one of the main villain's henchmen, because she's the only major bad guy that made it out of the series, through three seasons no less, alive and uncaptured. I reckon she needs a good villain's death to put a bow on things. Also, if he's not busy with another Bourne movie, I bet Paul Greengrass could do a pretty damn good job as director.

There's also rumors about them about doing a spinoff TV series with Freddie Prinze Jr.'s character Cole Ortiz in a few years, but that's an absolute fucking joke. 24 is Jack Bauer. Jack Bauer is 24. No Jack, no show, and definitely not one starring Cole. The only two non-Jack characters I could see being cool enough to anchor even a six-to-eight episode Jackless mini-season are Curtis Manning and Renee Walker, and both of them are dead, the former by Jack's own hand. So 24 is done on television, at least as something with any dignity whatsoever. The movie is our last best hope.

To sum things up, I SWEAR TO GOD I WILL KILL YOU, TELL ME WHERE THE BOMB IS

Chances of me ever rewatching 24 from beginning to end: 5%

Chances of me ever rewatching season eight of 24 while skipping most of the Dana Walsh subplot: 20%

Chances of me ever rewatching season one of 24: 65%

Chances of me watching the 24 movie when it comes out in theaters: 99%