88 Minutes (2007/8) -

A stunning wrongheaded concoction posing as an "adult" thriller. Al Pacino plays Dr. Jack Gramm, a forensic psychiatrist whose carefully crafted professional persona casts a long shadow. He's a famous provider of "expert testimony" who regularly makes the rounds of the television talkshow circuit. He also teaches an elite seminar at an apparently major university. And, as the film begins, he's the subject of a gaslighting by an anonymous stalker who keeps promising that he'll die in eighty-eight minutes. (The basic shtick is that one of Gramm's most high-profile convictions -- a serial rapist/murderer whose conviction rested almost exclusively upon evidence provided by Gramm -- is coming up for execution, occasioning a new round of scrutiny for this controversial conviction.) So, the story basically goes: a new batch of murder's matching the profile of the incarcerated killer begin popping up around town. The kicker is that all the victims happen to be young women in Jack Gramm's life. At the same time, the convicted killer is hollering once again about his innocence. Together, these three circumstances begin to cast suspicion on Jack just as his day starts becoming really complicated when he begins receiving cell phone calls from a mysterious voiced man who claims that Gramm will be dead in eighty-eight minutes. So, the narrative must maneuver all of these plot points -- exonerate Jack, reveal the perpetrator of the hoax, kill a couple more women along the way to keep things "interesting", blahblahblah. At center is Al Pacino in a giant wig, huffing and puffing his way through various close calls. The cast around him (Leelee Sobieski, Alicia Witt, Amy Brenneman, William Forsythe, Benjamin McKenzie) all are foils, alternately doubting Gramm's innocence even as their own guilt at the possible gaslighter opens and closes at arbitrary intervals. I found that I felt mostly sorry for this talented youngish cast, who (inevitably) hopped on board this ridonkulous project for the chance to work with Pacino. But a lot of good it does them. Some try their best to do good work (Witt, Brenneman, Forsythe) and come out relatively unscathed, while others provide proof of just how much they can (and cannot) do. (Truth be told, Sobieski does give Pacino a run for the "worst" acting in this movie, though the disaster of her performance is less tragic than that represented by his.) The real problem is that the film has no idea what it wants to be. It's really the kind of movie Michael Douglas might have starred in back in 1996 but, with Pacino in the lead role, there seems to be a greater sense of reach in the film but little intelligence, insight or irony to back it up. (A cynical "twist" toward the end -- in which Gramm's ethical vagaries are confirmed -- does little to amplify the emotional or moral significance of this utterly derivative conceit.) And every time we get Neil McDonagh on screen, it's a confirmation of how (a) utterly conventional this story is and (b) nobody but McDonagh knows how to play this kind of tripe. When he's on, it's fun. When he's gone, it's deadly dull -- by turns sluggish and silly. It's a genre piece done arty. Kitsch without enough cleverness/artistry to take it into the realm of camp/cheese. But with enough lurid, default misogyny to make the whole enterprise feel gross. Like Pacino's tanning booth face and Elizabeth Taylor wig.

For The Bible Tells Me So (2007) +

An entirely lucid and utterly careful examination of the biblical basis of anti-gay rhetoric, sentiment and activism -- offered from the perspective of a group of families whose own views and activism within the church has shifted (albeit to varying degrees) as a direct result of loving a gay child. The film is not so much an expose of the radically arbitrary ways the bible is used to support and foment anti-gay sentiment (though, with the support of a diverse array of biblical experts, it does that too) but mostly an account of the various ways evangelical protestant families have made it "through" the challenges of loving a gay child. The families are a diverse lot -- a religious mom who shuns her lesbian daughter until that daughter's suicide transforms the surviving mother into a PFLAG activist; Senator Dick Gephart's maneuvering of the private/public challenge when his adult daughter comes out; two parents uncertain about their own feelings and beliefs when their attractive teen son comes out in high school; a mother and father's decision to love their daughter while disapproving of her life; the experiences of parents who are in their 70s and 80s when their son becomes the first avowedly gay Episcopalian bishop -- and this works to the films advantage, as the stories in concert demonstrate the particularities of each persons struggle reconciling homosexuality and faith. The film also feels very much like the kind of story one could show one's family with relatively little concern. An admirable piece of documentary filmmaking built around the project of awareness.

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008) +

A sweet, simple teen romantic comedy with a distinctively contemporary verve. Michael Cera and Kat Dennings play the title characters. Cera's Nick is a painfully romantic kid, who's stuck in a swoonpit for his ex-girlfriend Tris (Alex Dziena giving an empathetic performance in the bitch role) even as she's moved on. Dennings's Norah is a "not high school pretty" and painfully intelligent girl who's burdened with big boobs and a famous/powerful father. This combination of features has cultivated an unhelpful cynicism in Norah, who regards any boy's interest with a weary wariness. Nora's ex-boyfriend -- a delightfully smarmy Jay Baruchel as the lead singer in an Israeli rock band -- embodies the worst of both of the mercenary attractions to Norah, and it's compelling to watch Dennings's Nora inhabit the unpleasantness of his attention. (What I like about the framing of this romance is that we see both Nick and Norah's humiliations in not letting go of these awful exes not as simply pathetic, but as a gesture of how hard it can be to let go of what you know. For both characters, the ex relationships are mostly verification that it is possible for someone to love them a little and it's really terrifying to let that go.) But I also like the framing of the story for the way these characters inhabit a complex social universe that's both plausible and delightfully fantastic. I love the simple high school conceit with music as the currency of self (Nick's been making Tris excellent mix cds, which Norah's been rescuing from the trash at school -- so Norah's sorta fallen in swoon with Nick long before she ever met him). I also like how Nick and Norah both have unlikely friends. Nick's the straight-boy mascot of a batch of cute, wackogay rock boys. Norah's best friend is the proto-alcoholic basket case Caroline (played brilliantly by the hilarious Ari Graynor, who inhabits a humiliation narrative with a just light enough touch to keep it from getting entirely sad). There're great comic set pieces, a "fantastic" (both in the most excellent and utter fantasy sense) culmination of Nick and Norah's romance, some genuinely funny/strange moments, and a sense of giddy adventure that comes from the "crazy NY night" conceit. In many ways, it's a perfect teen romantic comedy -- loaded with attractive kids giving sweetly silly performances while also being allowed to be smart at the same time. I guess I liked it for being everything I like/d about Juno (without the supposedly elevating gravitas) and also being everything I like/d about Can't Hardly Wait (without cloying Hollywood veneer). A genuinely sweet and genuinely funny and basically smart teen romantic comedy. They really should make more of them.

Coraline (2009) -

A visually compelling parable about the temptations of ingratitude -- the perilous pleasures derived when you're certain that your life sucks. The film focuses on a little girl named Coraline, whose life is characterized by a constant barrage of mundane humiliations (beginning, of course, with the fact that no one seems capable of calling her by her correct name, insisting to address her as "Caroline"). When she and her work-obsessed parents move into a ratty apartment building in the middle of nowhere, Coraline is certain its all part of a scheme to make her miserable and sets out plotting her escape from the dreary new place she now calls home. A mysterious neighbor boy -- who Coraline treats miserably upon their first encounter -- delivers a gift, in the form of a doll that looks remarkably like Coraline. The doll is enchanted, and soon Coraline becomes absorbed in a series of delightful adventures in an alternate universe: one where her parents dote on her, delicious food is plentiful, and both the upstairs and downstairs neighbors present marvelous entertainments solely for Coraline's diversion and amusement. At first it seems like the alternate world is solely of her own dreaming but, as Coraline becomes incrementally more miserable in her daily life, the line separating the two worlds becomes ever less distinct. Of course, there's something ominous about the alternate world -- where everyone has buttons for eyes (kuh-reepy!) -- and soon it becomes clear that something malevolent is afoot on the other side of that little door. (A miniature door is the portal between these parallel dimensions.) As the narrative proceeds, Coraline must accomplish all sorts of formidable tasks in order to rescue several spirits trapped on the other side. The narrative is a moral parable addressed to children, melding the macabre whimsy of Edward Gorey and the magical sermonizing of Shel Silverstein, Carole Kind and/or Maurice Sendak. The one thing missing is the gleeful sense of whimsical possibility that Roald Dahl was so good at, wherein the scary comingled with the silly to make for truly gratifying journey toward moral resolution. The story here -- taken from Neil Gaiman -- seems always to be an adult speaking to a kid, and though Coraline is at the center of the story, she's as annoying and unappealing as "I Don't Care" Pierre or any of the unfortunate Golden Ticket holders. Which proves a problem. I don't know why I'm to care about Coraline, or Coraline's adventures. Indeed, I really am not encouraged to have even as much empathy as I do for Edmund in the first Narnia tale. Coraline's impossible, yet she's the hero. It's a curious narrative dilemma. Visually, however, this film is a feast. Incredible visual spectacles unfold at nearly every turn, all using a delightful "repurposing" sensibility (wherein everyday objects are transformed into thrilling discoveries). Unfortunately, the visual delight -- the film looks just amazing -- doesn't do much to clarify the cynical narrative. So the whole film's a little too scary, a little too arch, and way too emotionally obtuse. I wanted to like it at every turn, but never found my way in. The vocal performances are flat (Teri Hatcher's and Dakota Fanning's especially) and the lesson of this moral parable never truly coalesce. I love genuinely scary, animated ghost stories with kid protagonists -- Monster House, as one example -- but this one seems pitched a little strangely. While there was much to admire about this film, there was little in it love.

His Name Was Jason: 30 Years of Friday the 13th (2009) +

A simple, entertaining, fan-centered documentary about the phenomenon of the Friday the 13th franchise. Directors, writers, and performers all talk about their participation in the developing franchise. Their varied points of view are effectively woven together to compose an interesting synthesis of the narrative constructed by the many many episodes in the franchise. Some great details emerge -- like the sound concept behind Jason's signature stalking motif -- and some amusing descriptions of how various scenes were accomplished. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the film involve everyone's theorization of "who is Jason" (given that the character has been reanimated using so many different conceits) which opens surprisingly interesting questions about the meaning of the narrative diachronically or synthetically. Mostly, however, the film works as a promotional teaser making even someone like me want to revisit all the films. Like I said, it's a fan-centered homage -- the filmmakers and stars being presented as participants in the same circuits of fan-culture as the presumed viewer of the film. But, really, quite engaging and interesting -- for a glorified DVD Special Feature. But there's a lot of material and, even for someone who fell off the Friday the 13th wagon after PartII, I found this homage to the series and its enduring pleasures to be utterly captivating.

Doubt (2008) +

Upon second viewing, Doubt impresses mostly for its hermetic efficiency. Shanley has crafted a diverting bauble, a compelling hypothetical that permits its well-intentioned audience much room to rehearse its pre-existing ideas. Nothing in this film -- or I suspect the play from which it is adapted -- requires that the audience confront their prejudices and predispositions. Rather, the film instigates a gratifying kind of self-reflexivity -- a lovingly filmed scenario that permits the audience to spend time mulling over their own thoughts and convictions. This, it seems to me, is what is most surprising about the piece: it doesn't provoke, really, at all. It invites thoughtfulness, but nothing so strenuous that it might cause someone to change their minds. And most insidiously perhaps, the film actually encourages the audience toward a kind of certitude: they film/play may not say but I know for sure. Which is sorta weird, actually, to stage a piece ostensibly about doubt and yet privilege the notion that people will believe what they are inclined to believe anyway. But what the film/play/narrative truly provides is the ring, the mat, the field of battle. As I was reflecting on the film, for the purposes of Viola Davis's Supporting Actress profile, that the film's many head-to-head confrontations are like a series of arm-wrestling matches, some of which end in victory for one or the other, but all of which are incredibly captivating. It's a hoot to watch these performers play through these roles, even if the roles make little sense beyond embodying key variables in Shanley's little game of morality algebra. Notably, Streep's performance was palpably richer on second viewing. Adams's work, too, signaled easily overlooked depths in nearly every scene. Davis's work was even more impressive, for its precision and its clarity, especially -- although I found it less emotionally compelling the second time through. And while Hoffman felt less mannered this time through, I found that I was more convinced of the performance's limits this time through. What I really admired this time through though (other than the surprising vulnerability with which Streep layers each of her dragonswipes) was Shanley's homage to working class NYC culture. It's a suspect romanticization, to be sure, as it's basically what was great about NYC before white flight, but it's stylishly done here. An interesting revisit... one that I found more gratifying than I anticipated.

He's Just Not That Into You (2009) -

An astonishingly tedious rumination on the contemporary courtship rituals of the privileged and attractive and heterosexual. The elaborate yet simple-minded plot is exhausting for its dependence on familiar formulas/cliches of the romantic comedy genre. Basically, this is what happens when you try to use Sex and the City's signature episode formula -- a soupy base of recognizable romantic difficulty, a heaping dollop of lifestyle porn, a dash of cute boy/man, and a garnish of flashy/pithy cameos -- and expect it to stand alone. The problem? The heart of SATC -- like Designing Women, Living Single, or The Golden Grils -- is the sustaining friendship shared among quite disparate women. Contemporary American filmmakers, however, find it really difficult to trust female friendship. So these women aren't really friends, just chattery co-workers inclined to shooting glib opinions and half-baked sympathies from their well-clad hips...or they're the other woman. Oddly, the guys in this film are pictured as having much more emotionally anchored relationships, although even those scenes are mostly scaffolding for early exposition with the relationships themselves fading as the film lumbers along. The cast is uniformly appealing. The three chattery coworkers -- 2 Jennifers and a Ginnifer -- are the most tediously scripted, and Jennifer Aniston and Jennifer Connelly do well reaching beyond the material to craft adequately appealing portraits of basically unappealing characters. Ginnifer Goodwin, in what is arguably the film's lead role, is way cute -- too cute actually -- for the role Drew Barrymore might have played a few years back. Unfortunately, Goodwin's performance is more annoying than endearing, largely because she's stuck playing such an emotionally monochromatic character. And I guess its the casting of this film that I find most annoying. Everyone's playing their type -- to a one this film is "perfectly" cast. You can almost imagine the screenwriters saying "we want a Jennifer Aniston type for the role of Beth" and then what happens when they get Jennifer Aniston for the role of Beth? It becomes fundamentally uninteresting because there's little discovery left to do. There's one scene in particular -- when Goodwin's Gigi has realized that Justin Long's Alex actually likes her and tell's Connelly's Janine about it -- Janine, who is supposed to be experience the incremental collapse of her marriage, immediately jumps into planning Gigi and Alex's "destination wedding." Both actresses do what they can with this scene -- Connelly playing the move as an desperate expression of Janine's deep denial, Goodwin registering the shock at her friends grasping romantic delusions. Yet the scene trucks on, the actress's "playing against the grain" doing little to actually complicate the sturdy artifice of the scene itself. And this is basically the way the whole film works. The actors's best efforts are for naught, and the film basically depends on how much you crush on the lifestyles depicted. The set decoration is glorious...straight out of dwell. Jobs are glamorous...with little work involved. And the relationships resolve as you expect them to upon first glance. Tedious, disappointing, obvious. I knew I was in trouble in the first scene when a galling "cute" joke about women's refusal to see the romantic truth literally "went to Africa" depicting tribeswomen gossiping. Dumb, racist, not funny. Then in the first real scene between Ben Affleck and Jennifer Aniston -- the couple who's choosing not to marry NOT because of something like a political commitment to marriage equality but because a vaguely anti-establishment mistrust of marriage as an institution -- when their first real fight over the idea of marriage is staged in front of some "edgy" painting with the word "should" written on it about twenty times -- when I saw that I sorta knew that this film's notion of sophisticated/subtle was pretty dumb and that I was in trouble. Sure enough. Dumb dumb dumb. And the film uses gay men and black people as obvious props while leaving lesbians completely out of the picture. (A smarter movie -- or at least Dan in Real Life smart -- would have had one of Aniston's sisters be a happily married lesbian, her partner sitting watching sports with the other brothers-in-law or something.) But then this movie appears to have had no interest in being smart. As MrStinky noted, it's enough to make you worry about the future of the "romantic comedy"...

The Last of Sheila (1973) +

An utter lark of a murder mystery, cleverly crafted by the (perhaps) unlikely screenwriting partners of actor Anthony Perkins and composer Stephen Sondheim and filmed by longtime Sondheim pal, Herbert Ross. (In short, the project is about as A-gay as any Hollywood project could get, circa 1973.) The set-up is delightfully baroque: a set-up that camps on the early 1970s fascination with all-star Agatha Christie parlor plays restaged in exotic locales; a delightedly sour tone that layers a scathing critique of Hollywood's most mercenary shallowness; and an intricate and captivating central mystery that keeps the twists coming until the final moments of the narrative. Featuring a delicious/weird cast (James Mason, Raquel Welch, Dyan Cannon, Joan Hackett, Ian McShane, Richard Benjamin, and James Coburn), the film surprises for the array of pleasures it assembles. You can enjoy the mystery while also delighting at the silliness of the spectacle. James Coburn is clearly having a blast, as are Cannon and Benjamin. McShane is a treat to look at. Hackett's acting her balls off, while Mason outacts everyone while barely breaking a sweat. And then there's Raquel. It will likely remain a mystery whether or not the whole character of Alice was intended as a spoof of Raquel Welch's signature style -- what I have called her "strangely passionate alacrity" -- or not. The filmmakers give poor Raquel the lamest lines, and she delivers them with a crazy sincerity that just makes me wonder if Tony, Steve and Herb weren't just pissing themselves with giggles in the editing room. It's not that they're mocking her, exactly, because there is no hint of cruelty in the film's presentation of her. Rather, it seems that they are just spooling the rope to see how far she will take it... Indeed, I wonder if this performance will emerge as one of my favorite Raquel turns in her superstar period. I'm not sure why the film remained off my radar until very recently. It's smart, weird, hilarious. Some of the casting choices are strange, and possibly attributable to the likelihood that they wanted to make this movie with their friends. (For example, Dyan Cannon is nothing in the excellent role of Christine, the ambitious Hollywood agent; she's also about years too young for the role, a hard-bitten Hollywood dame who was a secretary in the HUAC era. It's not impossible that Cannon, who would have been in her mid-teens during the McCarthy moment, might have worked in the secretarial pool at 16 but Cannon always acts like she's sixteen so we don't really get it that she and Coburn and Mason are industry peers who understand each other. I would have loved to see someone like Bacall or Stapleton in this role; would have read entirely differently.) The whole treatment of male homosexuality, too, is a fascinating glimpse into the lives folks like Ross and Perkins must have led. And while I was able to "call" most of the later twists -- the final use of the puppets; the red herrings in the first interpretation of the crime; etcetera -- the film remained a complete hoot, of the sort that I wish they made more of... I don't like reading mysteries but I sure do enjoy watching attractive, ostensibly glamorous people play at murder. And the spectacle of James Coburn in drag while wearing a monk's robes? Cuckoo crazy in only the best of ways. A lark.

Play Time (1967) +

A visually stunning comic opus. Jacques Tati constructs a visual landscape -- a high modern urban maze in which his character Monsieur Hulot gets variously lost. At the same time, Tati stages the parallel story of a warm American tourist who seems as at ease within this urbanized modernity as Hulot seems flummoxed. The film is meditative in tone, even as it executes some of the most intricate and subtle comic set pieces ever stage in cinema. The palette is all steel grey, with slight variations toward the green, blue and gold, so that the occasional splash of color (the blue of the elusive businessman's blazer, the american tourists's hats, the blue of a workman's uniform) becomes almost radiant. The fabricated landscape is loaded with giant sheets of glass -- doors, walls, windows -- which simultaneously force a curious lack of privacy even as they install a new kind of estrangement. The opening sequences in the modern office building and department store are enthralling but it's not until the extended sequence in the new restaurant that the film really becomes satisfying. There's a concentrated chaos in the restaurant, which permits a kind of gratification as we follow the vast array of running gags through the skein of confusion and chaos. I've never seen a film like Tatis's Play Time. It's poignant. It's literate. It's a visual feast. It's a tough go. Yet, for the most part, it's gratifying. I think what becomes most impressive about the film, at this historical moment, is that its an utter fabrication. Most of these sets -- interior and exterior -- were built on a soundstage, to Tati's precise specification. So, as such, none of them are "real" yet neither are they CGI. There's an old school artistry to the physical comedy, I guess, when we acknowledge that this is a built environment constructed solely for the purpose of making this elaborate series of refined visual jokes. As such, I guess, I'm fundamentally impressed by this as a triumph high-modern (and also post-modern) bit of physical comedy, of prop comedy, and of comedic commentary on contemporary society. I don't have much original insight on the film really. Most of my thoughts run the conventional routes -- this bit worked better for me than that; I'd love to see it in its intended 70mm; talk about redefining what masterpiece means -- but I am really glad to have seen the film, and I suspect the bits will haunt me for some time. (And I can't believe Professor Weinstein didn't show this in City and the Arts; must not have been available or something.) But an amazing piece of cinema, the kind that broadens your vision of what cinema is capable of, even/especially without the ornamental geegaws provided by cgi (though his use of 70mm does anchor this in the history of "new" cinematic technology in important ways). Anyway. Wow.