The 10 Worst Movies of 2008

This is an annual tradition here at Crushed by Inertia - one of the few I've managed to keep up - and so even though I've been blogging less lately, I wasn't going to skip it. (Also stay tuned for my "Best Movies of the Year" list, which is currently being written. (I still have to see a few big, Oscar-buzzy end of the year films before it's finalized as well). I know I say this every year, but it feels like 2008 had a higher-than-average number of truly awful movies. Some really good ones, too, but...holy shitballs...I mean...wow...

MOVIES I DIDN'T SEE BUT THAT I'M SURE WERE HORRIBLE

The Love Guru

One of the least appealing trailers I have ever seen. I couldn't even watch this film just based on Myers' atrocious accent.

Bangkok Dangerous

I've seen the original Thai version of this (the American one is made by the same guys, the Pang Brothers), and it sucked. Now it sucks with Nicolas Cage, which likely makes for a deeper and more nuanced level of suck. But I think I can safely skip it anyway, unless it develops a Wicker Man-esque cult-like reputation for sucking so bad, in which case I'll have to check it out after all.

Vantage Point

I have completely lost all interest in these kinds of "race against the clock" thrillers. Seriously, they never add up to anything more than gimmicry. Has any movie in this genre - and I'm thinking of stuff like Nick of Time or Snake Eyes here - been good in decades? Seriously...decades...

Superhero Movie/Disaster Movie

STOP! Please, stop! I can't take even hearing about the existence of these any more. The parody movie is unfortunately dead. You have killed it. Let it rest in peace, you bastards.

Smart People

Oh my God, I'm so urbane and Caucasian...It's awful...Please listen to me whine about my chronic depression and my intimacy issues for two hours while I make informed cultural references...What if I bring Juno along? That do anything for you?

Meet Dave

Hey, it's "Herman's Head" meets Pluto Nash! Who wouldn't want to see that?

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

Really? I need another entry in the Brendan Fraser Mummy series like I need another Fast and the Furious sequel. Wait, really? They're doing another one of...with Vin Diesel and Paul Walker again...Are you fucking serious? Ugh.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

Yeah, I just don't care any more. I even liked Revenge of the Sith, too. But it's just overkill now. Congratulations, LucasFilm. In the course of one year, you made me bored with both Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Fortunately, you've got so many other great properties to work with...I'm anxiously awaiting the big Radioland Murders follow-up.

Righteous Kill

It has been so long since either of them were relevant, it's hard for me to even remember being excited about the prospect of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro sharing the screen. Now, it just invites grim mathematics...if two guys whose films are routinely awful star in a film together, with their awfulness cancel one another out, or make the film doubly awful? My bet was the latter.

The Duchess

I can't take one fucking more pouty-yet-defiant Keira Knightley bland-fest. It's just not in me. I'm done.

An American Carol

I watched the Ben Stein documentary. Isn't that enough? I'm not sure I can handle Kelsey Grammar as General Patton, okay? I'm delicate.

Seven Pounds

Will Smith's annual venture into treacly earnestness never interests me. This movie looks so earnest, I hear they digitally added Jim Varney into a couple of scenes, just for the sake of consistency.

You Don't Mess With the Zohan

This was a recommendation from @britsilverstein on Twitter. Adam Sandler making a bad comedy based solely around a wacky accent and a wig is pretty much an annual event any more. He's on a rather amazing streak, really: It's almost impressive (almost!) how steadily drab and uninspired his films have been for more than a decade now. (What was the last one that actually worked as a film at all? Wedding Singer? That was 1998!

And now...

THE 10 WORST FILMS OF 2008

10. Rambo

Okay, the film is complete nonsense that takes itself very seriously. Fine. I could deal with that. But it also feels the need to realistically recreate in the most fetishized, off-putting, gruesome manner possible, acts of deplorable violence against innocent men, women and even children. I'm not a prude when it comes to movie violence BY ANY MEANS. I've even defended Hostel on this blog. But there is a huge difference between cartoonish movie violence, designed to elicit chills or even laughs, and brutal recreations of genuine international conflicts. Do we really need to see wave after desensitizing wave of villagers cut down in vividly gory detail to recognize that Sylvester Stallone's character is heroic?

From my original review:

Once we arrive in Burma, the movie is essentially a carnage promo reel. Think "Satan's Screen Saver." The Burmese army enters villages, rapes women and children, and generally just turns every living thing into CG-enhanced red goo, much of which is splattered directly into the camera. Then we get some scenes of Rambo laying waste to the bad guys, and then the film's over.



9. Jumper

It's hard to even write anything about this movie, because I remembered so little about it 10 minutes after it's over. The narrative is garbled, clunky and confusing - I suppose you could follow it if you were really determined, but who would want to actually devote the energy? Something about a war between Samuel L. Jackson and other actors who don't yell quite as loudly as Samuel L. Jackson.

I will say that I distinctly recall hating the film's protagonist, a man who can teleport at will and uses it to non-creative ends like robbing banks and impressing ladies. I suppose it's somewhat realistic that a young guy would use these powers in that fashion, but that doesn't mean I'm going to root for him when a bad guy wants to put an end to his journey of greedy, perverted self-discovery. Doug Liman once made good, or at least watchable, movies. Now he turns in woeful turds like Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Jumper. Did we anger him somehow? How can I make this right?

8. Get Smart



The wit of the original TV series "Get Smart" never once surfaces in this wretched, embarrassingly-unfunny homage, which is a shame, because Steve Carrell could have worked as Maxwell Smart in an actual adaptation.

I'm not sure anyone who was involved in making this film has ever seen the series "Get Smart." Neither the characters nor situations in this film not resemble their original counterparts in any way, and they don't even make any sense and behave inconsistently from one scene to the next.

Does The Chief like and respect Agent 86, or does he think he's an idiot? What about Agent 99? I'm not even sure if Max is supposed to be smart or dumb in this version. The movie hasn't even figured that out! He's sort of like Ace Ventura - brilliant in one moment, then talking with his butt the next. I didn't think that character worked too well either, but at least Jim Carrey was completely unleashed to do his thing in every moment of every scene, squeezing out all the laughs he could from a murky, uninteresting premise. Here, Carrell's given a bunch of lame, unfunny dialogue and a stupid spy plot to navigate and never gets to open up and have any fun with it at all.

What results is a 90 minute comedy without a single actual funny joke. Pathetic.

7. The Ruins

I swear to Christ, the plot of The Ruins involves a bunch of teens on an outdoor adventure that get chased to the top of a temple and then are not allowed to move around or leave! Seriously, THAT sounds like a fun romp. I mean, maybe as a set-up for a STAGE PLAY, that could work. But as a movie? It's like "Samuel Beckett's Existential House of Horrors."

Possible tagline: "A nightmare may be just around the next corner...too bad you're stuck on that stupid sound-stage looking Aztec-like ruin, fuckstick."

I'll also add that this is the latest in a spate of recent horror films that confuse "scary scenes" with "scenes showing people in excruciating pain." Now, sometimes a scene that is scary also happens to feature an individual that's in excruciating pain. But JUST because you're showing someone who's hurt real bad doesn't necessary mean that the scene is going to be exciting, frightening, or spine-tingling for the audience. Just maybe difficult to watch, if anyone's sensitive to that sort of thing. I'm not sure why this is so confusing for this new upcoming generation of horror movie directors, but here we are.

6. Teeth

Watching Teeth, I got the impression that writer/director Mitchell Lichtenstein read about the archetypal concept of "vagina dentata" (or "toothed vagina") somewhere, laughed for 20 days or so, and then wrote this "movie" in a weekend. The thing is, if you've matured to a point where the mere concepts of penises and vaginas no longer make you howl with laughter, you're probably a bit too grown-up for this movie. Which means the ideal audience for the film's humor is too young to actually get to see the film, which includes a few close-ups of its favorite organs and is therefore inappropriate by the contemporary standards of American parents.

A movie about a girl whose vagina bites off weiners could potentially be clever, I guess, though I'm tempted to say that 99% of the time, it would quickly devolve into sophomoric, Troma-esque "gross out" schlock or camp, as it does here within 10 minutes. Even worse than the fact that he's just retelling the same dick and pussy joke for the length of a feature, though, Lichtenstein actually thinks he has something to say about sexually repressed religion-obsessed Middle Americans or something. He doesn't.

5. Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

Yes, I actually watched it. (Hey, it's streaming free on Netflix). Suffice it to say, Ben Stein should stick to hosting game shows and eye drop ads. His anti-evolution screed (let's not mince words, "Intelligent Design" as a theory and this movie as a propaganda item are nothing more than rejections of evolutionary theory) is both offensively and bafflingly stupid. There is a difference.

Insultingly stupid is when someone says something stupid that you secretly think he or she doesn't really believe, just to see if they can make YOU believe it. For example, when Ben Stein implies that the theory of evolution is responsible for the Nazis.

Bafflingly stupid is when someone says something stupid that you think he or she really does believe, and you're stunned that anyone could possibly hold this position. For example, every other scene in this movie.

Stein's constantly trying to make the case that his viewpoint has been PURPOSEFULLY LEFT OUT of school curricula across the nation, as if this is somehow rare and his beliefs have been singled out. He's of course never able to reasonably make his case in this film, because it's dumb. Most things that could possibly be taught in schools aren't actually taught there, because of time constraints or a lack of consensus or a million other factors, not because of deep-seated prejudice towards them or those that believe them. So Stein just kind of hopes you won't notice this glaring hole in his argument and never addresses the issue of just why we should give his particular viewpoint more credence than any of the other hundreds of thousands of personal philosophies on the origin and nature of the universe that Americans might hold.

4. The Women

The opening titles of The Women credit the screenplay to Diane English, a human person, but this can't be right, because none of its characters have any genuinely human qualities, or behave the way real people would. It's like watching Russian spies try to recreate "Sex and the City" using sophisticated robots.

Like "Sex and the City," we have a diverse cast of four well-off ladies who are good friends. Only these women don't share any chemistry, or really anything in common, and the film can't be bothered to establish their friendship before the "plot" kicks in anyway. "They like each other," the movie seems to say. "Just go with it."

Actually, now that I think about it, the film can't really be bothered to establish anything about anyone in it, and that's why it's impossible to care what happens to them. English just relies on tired dog whistles and lazy sitcom shorthand - the home-wrecking floozy loves perfume and expensive clothes, the busy career-woman is always on her cell-phone, the brilliant writer is a troubled lesbian...Blurgh.



Also, I hate to say this, but Meg Ryan's horrible plastic surgery is making it hard for me to buy her in any movie roles any more. She's made it so she can really only play "over-the-hill actress who got a lot of unfortunate work done" believably any more.

3. The Happening

M. Night Shyamalan went from being one of the most promising up-and-coming American filmmakers to a national joke REALLY fast. It's bewildering. I don't think his downward slide is going to stop until he just stops getting money to make movies. Considering his level of name recognition, I'm doubting that will happen any time soon, which is really too bad for all of us.



I can't really recap his latest bit of mawkish, self-aggrandizing claptrap any better than I did in my original review:

Not only does The Happening lack any kind of tangible antagonist or enemy, it lacks any kind of conflict whatsoever. There are two types of scenes - scenes in which Wahlberg finds out something about the "happening" second-hand and scenes in which Wahlberg watches people in the middle distance kill themselves in increasingly laughable ways. You may notice, neither of those scenes involves any kind of conflict.

The most compelling bit of dialogue in the entire film is played between Wahlberg and a potted plant...At a random point, the film just ends, without purpose or explanation or any kind of pay-off or showdown or denouement whatsoever. The last scene is meant to be chilling, but it's so obvious what's coming and so silly by that point that it actually plays like a joke. And that first credit - "A Film By M. Night Shyamalan" - is the punchline.

2. Speed Racer

I think we can all agree that something can be an innovation without necessary moving things in a positive direction. Many people I've spoken with want to give Speed Racer a pass because it is trying to do something new with computer-generated imagery in films, to take a live-action movie and meld it with an animator's sense of color, pacing and motion.

I will happily grant that I have never seen another film that felt or looked like Speed Racer. But that's a good thing, because this is the cinematic equivalent of eating a tub full of cotton candy and then riding the Tilt-A-Whirl until it becomes up a regurgitated pink mass in the center of your favorite shirt. I've never seen a movie animated exclusively with human feces either, but that doesn't mean I want the Wachowskis to give it a shot...just to see if they can...



That this ugly mess is 2.5 hours long makes me think the Larry and Andy may have been in league with Donald Rumsfeld and John Yoo. They couldn't have intended this for use on American audiences, could they? It makes the Matrix sequels look sparse and unassuming.

1. The Spirit

I thought FOR SURE when I beheld the grotesquerie that is Speed Racer that it would be my pick for Worst Film of 2008. I was POSITIVE. 100%, not a doubt in my mind, that I'd hate it more than any other film this year. I found it physically painful.

But, no, Frank Miller's attempt to reinvent the Will Eisner comic The Spirit outdoes it, and at a far more efficient 90 minutes to boot. This movie hits every single "bad movie" note RESOUNDINGLY:

- It makes absolutely no sense and displays shockingly little narrative continuity
- It is hugely, massively shrill and irritating
- Ceaselessly gimmicky, the movie never stops dicking around to even attempt something mundane like storytelling
- The dialogue is atrocious
- The performances are excruciatingly broad

Miller's amateurish writing and direction here is actually kind of shocking. The story's so incomprehensible, he constantly has the Spirit explaining the plot directly to the viewer, either in voice-over or actually by TALKING TO HIMSELF in the middle of a scene. Looney Tunes-style sound effects and not just impossible, but impossibly silly, physics spoil all of the action and fight scenes. The comedy falls ENTIRELY flat, and suffers from both an intensely juvenile sensibility along with poor timing and a tendency to make references that no one besides a hardcore comic book dork would appreciate. Many of the scenes resort to having Samuel L. Jackson yell random phrases ("egg on my face!!!!!!!!") while mugging for the camera.

And as for the visuals, it looks like a poorly-shot Sin City with really bad production values. Check out the make-up and costumes:



What the fuck is that? That supposed to be funny?

The Spirit is a complete disaster. The whole time I was watching it, I tried to imagine the level of dread and panic that must have set in among executives when they started seeing the first dailies. I don't think there's a single minute of footage you could take from out of this nightmare to even simulate the existence of a decent movie.

Revolutionary Road

Sam Mendes returns to the same subject matter as his Oscar-winning American Beauty in this adaptation of the 1961 Richard Yates novel: well-off white suburban angst. The genders are reversed, but otherwise, the situations in the two films are remarkably similar. One member of a couple living a superficially idyllic suburban life gets restless and can no longer stand the dull routine of conforming and consuming, leading the other member to seek a return to steady, quotidian equilibrium.



Kevin Spacey's vague ennui is a bit easier to tolerate in Beauty (a film, I admit, I loved at the time of its release, but which has lost some of its allure in the ensuing years) because the character and the film are funny (composed, as they were, by former sitcom writer Alan Ball). In Road, Kate Winslet's April Wheeler is so severe, so deadly serious at all times, it's sometimes hard to understand her desire to break free of the mundane at all.

It's not that Winslet gives a bad performance. Quite the contrary.

As scripted by Justin Haythe (I have not read Yates' novel), April could have been an extremely unsympathetic heroine. Her behavior is erratic, her moods shift wildly, and she makes some difficult choices. Winslet succeeds in bringing out April's essential decency, and this makes her plight far more deeply felt and meaningful. A character that could have come off as almost maniacal is instead pitiable, a woman who knows exactly the thing that could make her happy - escape - and who comes perilously close to getting it before seeing her dream strangled.

I think the problem, with both Road and, to some extent, American Beauty, is that both films fail to really capture exactly what it is about the suburbs that make their respective protagonists SO insane. Like, yes, these communities seem boring, and filled with phonies, and senselessly focused on "outdoing the neighbors" with impulsive purchasing. Like many Americans who live in rural or urban neighborhoods, many of these characters are trapped in increasingly bitter, sexually frustrating marriages.

But we're not talking garden variety disillusionment, or even depression, here. Revolutionary Road, in many ways, is a film about a woman driven to a nervous breakdown by the pressures of suburban life. Yet the film BEGINS with her already feeling intense distaste for her situation. We never get a chance to understand what has pushed her to this point. It makes Mendes' films on this subject, on some level, rather superficial. It's easy to just axiomatically insist that the suburbs are a certain way, but it's much more difficult, and satisfying dramatically, to actually render them this way.

As April's husband, Frank, Leonardo DiCaprio does his usual professional job, but this isn't one of those roles with which he really connects. DiCaprio's never bad, but he only really gets to disappear into a role every rare once in a while.

As with every Mendes film, Revolutionary Road looks great. (Naturally, as it's shot by Roger Deakins). The era of the early '60s is brought vibrantly to life, particularly in scenes depicting Frank's daily commute to work in the city. The movie turns imagery that's often fetishized, played as charming and desirable, in old films - seas of men in suits and hats pouring through city streets and rail cars - into a sinister landscape of existential terror. As we watch, Frank genuinely disappears into a faceless mob. I do think, as I've kind of made clear at this point, Mendes hews a bit too close to the style he already explored in American Beauty. Some moments in this new film, despite the difference in era, seem damn near interchangeable, particularly a series of sequences in which emotionally fragile husbands look out over their neighbor's property with a sense of quiet yearning while tinkling piano plays in the background.

[I should note here that one thing that likewise hurts Revolutionary Road is that it's very similar to the best show currently on television, "Mad Men," in both aesthetic and content. Frank and April's dilemma is still somewhat provocative and compelling to watch, but they're no Don and Betty Draper. A random episode of "Mad Men's" second season would likely be a more entertaining, complex depiction of a tense early '60s upwardly-mobile marital standoff than Revolutionary Road. The film would have felt a lot more essential, I suspect, if it had come first.]

In Which I Return from the Wilderness

Hey there, Lon-atics...Sorry for the unannounced sabbatical. I'm sure all 8 of you regular readers have been obsessively hitting refresh every three minutes for, like, weeks now. Not much that could be done, I'm afraid - it has been a fairly ludicrous August here at CBI Central. Some of it was spent balled up in the corner in the fetal position...other parts, not as much. I'm sure, in six months, there'll be a good blog post in there somewhere.

But for now, let's just cover a few things about which I didn't get a chance to opine:

(1) Joe Biden has silly hair and a history of being kind of an asshat, but old people like him

Near as I can tell, what happened was, Obama noticed that a lot of old people, even Democrats, don't really want to vote for him. Now, I'm not going to go ahead and say that this is just because he's a black guy and a lot of old people are racists...I'm sure there are plenty of other possibilities. His repeated calls to criminalize pre-5 pm dinner times, for example. Or his constant efforts to get "NCIS" canceled.

Anyway, here's this guy who has run for president a bunch of times, so if there were anything REALLY BAD about him we'd know it already. And this guy's been around forever, so all the old people recognize him and forget that he's not some avuncular celebrity from a bygone era, such as George Peppard...Then, feeling comfortable again, they agree to vote for the black guy. At least, that was probably the what the Obama camp was thinking.

I personally think it's an adequate but uninspired choice, which is a shame, because a lot of Obama's other choices have been inspired. I would have preferred a few of the suggested VP's, but then again, I'd have really hated to pull a lever or punch a hole or whatever the fuck California's going to have us do for a Sam Nunn or an Evan Bayh, people who stand for 94% of what I loathe about America. (Beating McCain's tight 97%!)

(2) If you've ever expressed any solidarity with liberalism, progressivism or the Democratic Party, you're not allowed to not vote for Obama because you dislike one relatively unimportant thing about him

For real. I don't care what that one thing is. Don't like Joe Biden? Not good enough. Pissed off about his betrayal on the FISA issue? Too bad. Angry that he's backed by a certain industry or lobbying group? They all are. Upset that he once said something not-very-nice about illegal file-traders? No one cares.

This election is really important. Like, seriously really intensely important. Here are some things that matter that will be at least partially decided by the outcome of the vote this November:

- Multiple horrifyingly violent conflicts around the world
- The future direction of the US economy
- More than one Supreme Court Justice, who will make major decisions on a whole host of crucial issues relating to daily life in America

If you look at those considerations but then say, "Yeah, but his former pastor once said that God should do bad stuff to America! And he doesn't like to wear pieces of flair with the American flag on them!," this means you are stupid. Hey, I'm just trying to help you out. Maybe you didn't know you were stupid. Now you do! Congrats, buddy!

This goes quadruple for you Twitter people reading this post. I'm really tired of hearing "I can't vote for Obama...he wants to raise taxes on exceptionally rich guys!" I forgot that you hate health care, reproductive rights and wars that end eventually.

(3) Tropic Thunder was much more funny than Pineapple Express

Both movies had parts that made me laugh. But I was very underwhelmed by Pineapple Express, considering the collaborators. Like every Judd Apatow movie, it was way too long, but I was just generally disappointed by the action. The whole final 30 minutes felt pointless. The action itself isn't particularly compelling or intense, so it just feels obligatory, unsuccessfully tacked on to the end of what is otherwise an amiable-enough stoner comedy. James Franco, however, does a really nice job, and I thought Craig Robinson, Danny McBride and Ed Begley Jr. were effective.

Tropic Thunder is actually pretty poorly assembled. It's really chaotic and frenzied, and I think that, had director Ben Stiller slowed down and let some of the situations/characters develop more, the whole enterprise would have worked much better. But even in its current form, Tropic Thunder is really funny and worth seeing. Robert Downey Jr. and Tom Cruise are, of course, the standouts, but the whole cast works together really well, and it's just so far out there, willing to do absolutely anything to get a laugh, that I just kind of gave myself over to the spirit of the enterprise and enjoyed the hell out of it. Not sure if it would hold up on repeat viewings...but who cares? It worked well once, and that was enough.

(4) I really like the new Walkmen album

You & Me is a stupid title for an album (much in the same way that She & Him is a stupid name for a musical duo), but it sounds like kind of a return to form for me. (I didn't like A Hundred Miles Off or that Nilsson tribute nearly as much as Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me is Gone.) These guys are just interesting to listen to in a way most bands are not. Wish I could be more specific than that, but long-time readers will recall I suck at describing what I like about songs. Just a weird blind spot for me.

(5) I got into a car accident

It was really stupid and all my fault. One of things that happen and it just ruins your whole week, cause you keep playing your momentary stupidity over and over in your mind, and it's too late to do anything about it.

Right after I hit the back of this lady's car, I pulled over, as did she, and I walked up to her car to make sure everyone was okay. She said, really mean, "What were you thinking?"

I get why she'd be upset. But, I mean, obviously I was thinking something totally unrelated to crashing my car into someone. If I were thinking about crashing my car, that would mean I had foreseen the accident, which would probably cause me to hit the brakes before colliding with anything. Unless I run into other people's cars intentionally, like I'm in a Cronenberg movie. But if I'm the kind of dude who's ramming into other people's cars in the hopes of having eventually having sex, Spader-style, with the ensuing stump, I'm not necessarily going to admit that when questioned.

What I'm saying is, basically, I hit her car for absolutely no good reason...but she asked me a stupid question. So, in a very real sense, we're now even.

(6) Flight attendants will soon have the World's Most Embarrassing Job

According to Fox News, a reliable source for information and perspectives about world news if ever there was one, flight attendants will be expected to monitor customer use of the in-flight wireless Internet service. And you know what that means:

If the person sitting next to you or your child is viewing explicit porn and you're not happy about it, feel free to direct your complaint to the flight attendant.

"Um, yes, pardon me Mr., um, Thompson...I hate to disturb you. Some of the other customers have complained about your loud and repetitive viewing of what appears, from this distance, to be a video entitled 'Cake Farts.' If you wouldn't mind safely stowing your laptop and genitals in their proper, upright position, we won't have to go and get the Taser. Can I get you some tomato juice, perhaps? Or a second complimentary vacuum-sealed packet containing 2.7 peanuts?"

[NOTE: I'm not linking to Cake Farts, you sick bastard. Look it up yourself.]

The Dark Knight

One complaint about Dark Knight - I'm not crazy about the way they're manipulating Christian Bale's voice when he's playing Batman. It sounds very unnatural, less like a man disguising his own voice so as not to be recognized, and more like an overused production effect. There are a few scenes where his voice sounds so deep and gravelly, it's kind of distracting.

Other than that, the movie's basically perfect. I can't think of one single other flaw. Clearly, Christopher Nolan has made the finest superhero film of all time, and overall one of the best mainstream films in recent memory. The movie's a rather extraordinary achievement - intense, spectacular, nuanced, thoughtful and at times downright frightening. I already have my tickets to see it again in two days, and that feels like a much longer wait than I'd ideally like to endure. In short: yeah, it's that good...believe the hype...



Dark Knight is one of those sequels that improves on the original, but it's kind of a tough comparison. Though the films have a similar aesthetic and share most of the same cast, Batman Begins feels like an adventure movie, rocketing around the globe over the course of years in the life of Bruce Wayne. (Only about half the film concerns the exploits of Wayne as Batman in Gotham City.) Dark Knight is more of a crime thriller than anything else.

I read a review several weeks ago that compared the movie to Heat, and though they're very different in tone, it's a comparison that makes some degree of sense. Both films are about the relationship between a criminal and his pursuer, and the ways in which adversaries on opposite sides of the law can, over time, become morally indistinguishable.

In the intervening time since Nolan's first Batman film, the Caped Crusader has expanded his influence over Gotham City. Criminal organizations that once operated on the streets with impunity have been forced underground, funneling all of their ill-gotten money through a shady Chinese businessman, hiding from the tenacious Lieutenant Gordon (Gary Oldman), aggressive District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and, of course, the freaky guy in the bat costume who keeps punching everybody (Christian Bale).

Dark Knight opens with a dazzling bank robbery sequence, orchestrated by the psychopathic criminal mastermind The Joker (Heath Ledger). He's a self-described "freak" with a scarred face who disguises himself behind clown make-up. And I do mean criminal mastermind. Ledger and Nolan have highlighted the character's sinister intelligence more in this film than any other representation of The Joker I have ever seen.

Typically, as in the portrayal by Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton's original Batman movie, The Joker is essentially a circus clown, only evil - an insane, greedy man with a cheesy sense of humor. My point is, the focus is always on The Joker's madness. He only does what he does because he's batshit insane, and maybe wants a little money.

Ledger's Joker is certainly insane, but he's also fiendishly, diabolically clever. Smarter and more careful, even, than Batman. Bruce Wayne's relative sanity, in fact, becomes his only weapon against his foe by the film's final act. The Joker's quick-witted enough to avoid any direct combat with Batman, and always seems to be one step ahead of all the other Gotham City authorities. Sporadic irrationality is his only weakness.

Enough praise cannot really be heaped upon Heath Ledger's performance in the film. His death was horribly tragic, both because of his young age and his massive talent, but you really feel this tragedy while watching Dark Knight. The guy is jaw-droppingly brilliant in the movie, a force of sheer menace and terror. He absolutely vanishes into the role.

The entire cast is solid, though most of the veterans of Batman Begins, except for Bale and Oldman, have diminished roles this time around. Eckhart's great as Dent, a part that jibes really well with his charming-but-cocky persona, and the script has a lot of fun with his general physical resemblance to Bale. Without venturing too much into Spoiler territory, let me say that he navigates a very over-the-top and complicated late plot twist swimmingly, and turns what could have been a very pulpy, even silly, conclusion into something much more heartfelt and tragic.

In a big surprise for me, Eric Roberts joins the cast as crime boss Salvatore Maroni and fits into the Gotham universe seamlessly.



As in Begins, the action in Dark Knight is massive in scale, presented at breakneck speed but nonetheless smooth, clear and viscerally satisfying. An extended chase sequence featuring several armored cars feels like something out of a post-apocalyptic war film. The remarkable way in which Nolan maneuvers around intricate, complex sequences of shouted dialgoue, shootouts, fistfights and cataclysmic explosions and back reminded me of Ridley Scott's masterful work in Black Hawk Down.

When I review Michael Bay movies, I'm always careful to point out that his movies suck not because they feature a lot of explosions, but because he's a hack who has no idea how to shoot or edit together explosions in a way that is compelling.

Dark Knight is a perfect example of this principle. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Christopher Nolan is the exact, 180-degree, polar opposite of Michael Bay. He's Bizarro Bay. Much of his film is consumed with violence, action and explosions, but they are presented with clarity, vigor and confidence by a group of artists and professionals, people who know exactly where to place everything, how to time it properly and how to capture it on film. The final result will be you on the edge of your seat wondering how the hell Batman got his motorcycle to flip around like that.

And of course, all of this terrific acting and technical wizardry is in the service of another tremendous screenplay by Nolan and his brother, Jonathan. As they did in Batman Begins, the Nolans (who conceived of the story with David Goyer) weave together an engaging, emotionally resonant original story from all the familiar elements of Batman comics - familiar villains, gadgets and vehicles, gangsters, scientific investigations, police corruption, even discourses on the nature of morality and justice.

What they've added this time around is a healthy dose of social commentary, turning Batman's struggle against an unpredictable foe bent on sparking chaos into a pretty straight-forward terrorism allegory that's surprisingly effective. But I will withhold further comment for another time, so as to avoid spoilers. Also, I think the dialogue is just better here than Batman Begins, which was a great script but also had a bit of a stilted feel. Dark Knight is more unsettling, and even more bleak, but it also feels more human. Not having to span so many years in the life of Bruce Wayne or establish him for an audience frees Nolan up to explore his villain with more depth and give his protagonist more of a lived-in, emotional life, beyond the crime-fighting and rage.

Anyway, I've gone on long enough, and could keep going, believe me. Just see the film. I'd recommend checking out the IMAX version, if possible. Only the establishing shots and some of the action scenes were actually filmed in IMAX, so the movie switches back and forth between very, very large to EXTREMELY large, but it looks gorgeous either way, and the sound in the IMAX theaters is mind-blowing.

Hancock

It would be hard to argue that Hancock doesn't give you your money's worth. In a tight 90 minutes, you get at least 4 entirely different movies. And you only have to pay for one ticket!

This was one of those scripts that floated around Hollywood forever, constantly changing hands. Most of the directors who had once flirted with the notion of directing the film, including Michael Mann and Jonathan Mostow, are now credited as producers. The task finally fell to Peter Berg, who does a pretty capable job, particularly in terms of the action and spectacle.

But a funny thing happened to Hancock on the way to the cineplex. It's hard to believe the original script was this kind of loopy, schizophrenic hybrid of ideas. This feels like the product of an endless stream of writers, each of them contributing one or two ideas that have been crudely stitched together into a movie. What we have here is quite possibly the very first romantic spiritual summer superhero comedy-drama ever made.

Things start out pretty normal, as a genial summer comedy starring Will Smith. He's well-cast as Hancock, a supernatural being in the mold of Superman (super-strong, impervious to bullets, able to fly), but with the drunk, feckless demeanor of Billy Bob Thornton's memorable Bad Santa. Sure, he saves innocents and thwarts crime, but he does so while drunk, and with a general disregard for property damage and basic decorum.

I don't think Will Smith is a bad actor, necessarily, but when he's working with earnest, dramatic material, you can sometimes catch him straining for credibility. The opening third or so of Hancock just lets the guy fall into his old comfortable rhythm. You sense he's having a good time playing the part, and it's fun to watch Will Smith have fun.

Hancock saves a well-meaning PR executive (Jason Bateman, basically still playing Michael Bluth...not that you hear me complaining...), who devises a crafty plan to turn the louse from a loathed public menace into a beloved superhero. These sequences (still very early in the film!), featuring Hancock's withering, half-assed attempts at saving the city, are silly, cartoonish and frequently hilarious. (The effects are so overblown and unrealistic, they develop a charm all their own. I was reminded, in some ways, of Stephen Chow's use of larger-than-life, "fake" effects in Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle.)



There's one particularly well-realized, exciting sequence in which Hancock foils a bank robbery that's quite possibly the best single scene that Berg has ever directed. Certainly more intense and impressive than anything in his dud from last year, The Kingdom.

Then we reach Act 2, the point when the movie must place some kind of complication or obstacle before its hero, blocking his or her path to success. And Hancock takes this concept to a completely unreasonable level. I mean, I know the hero is essentially invincible but man, these guys are not screwing around. I won't get into spoiler territory, but the entire second half of this movie just pulls you in fifteen different directions all at once until you have absolutely no footing on what the hell is going on or how you're meant to feel about it.

It's always a bad sign when people have to keep running into the frame to explain what the hell is going on throughout the conclusion of your action-comedy, for starters. And actually, by the end, this movie isn't even remotely funny. Like, if you laugh at anything towards the end of Hancock, you're kind of a sick bastard.

I'm all for genre-mashing experiments, but there has to be some kind of balance. When the beginning of a movie is as broad as Hancock, it's hard to force a viewer to settle in for something much more severe and even thoughtful, no matter how much care has been put into the actual narrative arc. There are many interesting ideas floating around in Hancock, but that's about all they're doing. This movie seriously needed to pick a direction and run with it rather than try to tackle so much.

WALL-E

To sum up my reaction to Pixar's WALL-E in one word: "astonishment."

I am astonished not only at the beauty and craftsmanship of WALL-E as a film, but at the very fact that such a narrative would unspool on the heels of the Walt Disney Pictures logo. Though the film is certainly appropriate for young audiences, and the children in the theater when I saw the film seemed transfixed enough, this is a piece of genuine, mature science-fiction, with all the attending Big Ideas and Complex Themes associated with that tradition. With this movie, Pixar completely steps outside of the realm of "family entertainment" to create something that is not only entertaining, whimsical and cute but also provocative and vital. It could very well end up being the year's best film.



Think I'm overstating the case here? WALL-E opens on a dystopian future Earth where all the humans have vanished and everything's coated in a thick layer of trash and grime, most of it bearing the logo of the Buy 'N Large Corporation. That's got to be a first in the Disney canon, right? Apocalyptic visions of the future in which rampant consumerism has somehow led to the end of human life on Earth?

A plucky, self-aware robot named WALL-E wanders around this hellscape picking up crash and crushing it into neat blocks. He does not speak. His only friends are a cockroach, the only living thing that seems to have survived the calamity, and the trinkets, remnants of human civilization, he finds during his travels.

Things change for WALL-E when he falls in love with another robot, EVE, who has flown to Earth on some kind of intergalactic mission. It's a tentative romance: neither WALL-E nor EVE have lips, nor can they speak, which can complicate such matters.

And it's about at this point that the tightrope Pixar is walking comes into clear relief...This is a complex love story about two robots, told without any dialogue. For pretty much the film's first half, the storytelling is entirely visual, pure animation. These characters are brought to life with such clarity, even their tiny gestures carry meaning and move the story forward.

Typically, when I hear people praise Pixar's animation, it's because of the gorgeous, eerily realistic, colorful worlds in which their stories take place. The bustling Scream Factory of Monsters, Inc., or the Paris of Ratatouille, or the scenic desert vistas of Cars. WALL-E certainly carries on this tradition.

After the film, we were discussing how accurately the animators managed to covey weightlessness when the characters are in space. All of the film's environments have been rendered in lush detail, from the brown, sand-coated Earth to the sleek, immaculate interiors of the Axiom Spacecraft. In a particularly nice touch, ancient live-action footage of the Big 'N Large CEO (played by a perfectly-chosen comic actor) urging you to shop till you drop plays on video screens in the background on Earth.

But beyond all the majesty of the settings, WALL-E works as well as it does because of the character animation. I'd say the work done here on WALL-E himself, the way his camera lens eyes constantly focus and refocus to take everything in, the way his neck extends slightly when he feels encouraged, his slight mechanized klutziness, more closely resembles the classic era of Disney Animation than anything the studio has released in my lifetime.

But WALL-E has more emotional resonance and adroit social commentary than many of Disney's animated classics (not all, but some), which sometimes used brilliant animation in the service of disposable fairy tale retreads. It's nothing less than a movie about the human race and its place on this planet, how the choices we're making right now about the way we live impact both ourselves and our environment. Plus it stars the voice of Jeff Garlin. Oh, just go see it already...

I Said What What in the Mutt?

Seriously? Is there anyone out there that would pay money for a collectible Mutt Williams figure? Unlike some other people I know, I wouldn't say that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Interdimensional Blanchett Eaters was a bad movie, necessarily. But it's hardly the sort of thing I can see inspiring the level of enthusiasm necessary to invest in a statue, particularly the Shia LaBeouf character.

I know Mutt uses a sword in the movie, but he just looks extremely dippy holding it here. Like a rejected "Street Fighter" character, or a schizophrenic guy's Halloween costume.

So how much would you pay for this handsome LeBeouf semi-likeness, handcrafted from the finest Vietnamese sweat/plastics. $500,000? $28 billion? Can you believe Sideshow Collectibles will actually give you this thing for the low low price of $150? Get on it now, people. They're only making as many of these as nerds will buy! After that, they're gone forever.

Also, you've got to love their little blurb:

These outstanding 1:6 scale figures are of the highest quality and detail, ready to take life on your shelf in any dynamic pose that you desire. Medicom Toy's RAH body is one of the most articulated 12-inch figure bodies available, capable of nearly any pose that the human body can achieve.

"Any dynamic pose you desire"? "Any pose that the human body can achieve"? What the hell are people doing with these things? Before, I just thought it was hilarious and silly. Now I'm genuinely disturbed. If 12'' Mutt is anatomically collect (in perfect 1:6 scale!), I'm fully prepared to write my Congressman about this.

The Incredible Hulk

With The Incredible Hulk, Marvel Studios have proven a few things comic book movie fans already knew, but perhaps studio executives did not:

(1) More is not always better.

I'm not saying this movies should be low-key or action-less. The Incredible Hulk gets rather outsized in the second half, to great effect. But it's not overloaded with tons of characters, constant computer-enhanced spectacle or a loud, booming soundtrack. Sometimes, taking your time, developing some tension and telling a simple story well is all it takes.

(2) Continuity matters.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of serialized comic book-style storytelling is the forging of connections between characters, creating an entire alternate reality, with its own rules. Marvel writers have spent decades fleshing out their Universe...it's ridiculous that, in translating the stories to film, they have been unable to introduce it to audiences until now.

The Incredible Hulk, even more so than this summer's triumphant Iron Man, really introduces the Marvel Universe on-screen, setting up not just a future Avengers film but a whole collection of potential connections and stories. The movie strikes just the right balance, including some references and nods to events going on outside the margins without getting too inside or complicated.

(3) The Incredible Hulk's backstory is not the stuff of high drama.

I personally think that Hulk, and his Bruce Banner side in particular, is among the least interesting mainstream comic book characters. Banner's just this kind of meek guy who's afraid of his powers. And while it's tremendous fun to see The Hulk smash things, he's basically just a buff monster. We're not talking a character the way Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne are characters. We're talking about a cipher.

Ang Lee tried to make an entire movie out of Hulk's origin, turning it into a Shakeapearean story about Fathers and Sons, when it's really just a bunch of silly nonsense about gamma rays and then a riff on Jekyll and Hyde. This new film wisely dispenses with it during the opening credits.



Though the new movie represents a complete break from Ang Lee's dull, plodding, nearly-Hulkless 2003 version, it nonetheless picks up pretty much right where that film left off. Bruce Banner (Ed Norton), doomed to transform into the out-of-control, violent Hulk whenever he gets angry, has fled to Brazil in the hopes of finding a rare flower that might cure his condition. Back in the U.S., Banner's girlfriend Betty (Liv Tyler) has moved on with her life. Her father, General Ross (William Hurt), has enlisted the aid of a notorious British soldier, Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth), to help him find the Hulk. (Ross wants to capture Banner, naturally, in the hopes of turning his Hulkness into a weapon).

Most of the film is taken up with this chase, with Ross and Blonsky pursuing Banner across the globe. A variety of not-particularly-convincing circumstances will slowly turn Blonsky from a normal man into the monstrous Abomination, leading to an epic final showdown in the streets of Harlem.

The film's major strength is in its simplicity. None of the technology or science is ever explained, because that stuff doesn't matter. "This machine will cure you from Hulking Out, or maybe it wont. Let's find out!" And because Incredible Hulk doesn't bother with an origin story, and keeps the narrative strongly focused on the chase, and the larger relationship between Banner and the Rosses, there's plenty of time for (1) large-scale, extended action scenes and (2) development of the Hulk's world and environment without rushing everything.

The decision to open the action in South America, in particular, really pays off. The movie's just visually interesting, even when there's no Hulk or explosions. Banner himself can be something of a blank (though Norton does a nice job of expressing his inner angst without getting too emo), but the world he occupies is very inviting and compelling on its own terms. Director Louis Leterrier has a tendency to show off a bit, throwing in a lot of visual noise and flair unnecessarily, but he nevertheless has made a good-looking, fast-paced film, and knows how to put an action scene together.

The only time things really slow down is when Tyler's Betty Ross takes center-stage. Zak Penn's script pretty much lets her down here, setting her up as a brilliant scientist and then giving her essentially nothing to solve and even less to do. It's essentially the same part Tyler played in Armageddon - the girl who really really loves the hero - and her boredom with the part is palpable at times. (Her one real bonding scene with the Hulk reminded me of some of Naomi Watts' work in King Kong, only I actually think this film plays slightly less ridiculous.)

The Happening

I'm not sure if writer/director M. Night Shyamalan meant this film's title ironically. It seems unlikely, but then again, it also seems unlikely that a man who has made so many other films would produce anything this hacky and amateurish. Yet here we are.

Nothing happens in The Happening. Absolutely nothing happens. This is a premise, not a story. In fact, The Happening lacks even the barest bones of a story. There is no beginning, middle or end. There is no inciting incident. Characters do not change, grow nor develop. Events do not progress in a logical manner. People are introduced and then discarded thoughtlessly.

I think it might be time for us to become seriously concerned about M. Night Shyamalan. Not for his career, but simply his mental health and well-being. It's not normal for a person who had, only a few years before, mastered the craft of screenwriting and directing to suddenly and without cause forget, on the most basic level, how to put a movie together. We're not talking about a dip in quality here; The Happening is like the work of a completely different man than The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, hell even Signs. Has Manoj suffered some sort of head trauma? Has he become hooked on oxycontin? Should we start considering a nationwide cinematic intervention?

Because his last two efforts - The Village and Lady in the Water - were themselves so dreadful, much of the discussion about The Happening and its complete failure to entertain or enlighten will naturally focus on relative comparisons. Though I still maintain that Lady in the Water remains Shyamalan's most delusional and embarrassing work to date, overall, it does have a few things going for it that Happening does not. Like, you know, a story to tell. Not a good story, mind you. But a story nonetheless. The Village has a reasonably watchable story; it just relies on a nonsensical twist ending.

The Happening is Cinema of the Inert, the introduction of a concept in the opening 5 minutes of a movie that is meant to sustain an audience's attention for 100 minutes. I'm noticing this about Shyamalan's work more and more. His initial films - The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable - certainly had high-concept premises, but they developed them into narratives that were themselves compelling. With stuff like Lady in the Water and The Happening, it's as if he no longer feels the need to tell stories. He thinks a single one of his ideas, alone and unencumbered, should be enough to sustain an audience's attention. He's mistaken.


About 3/4 of the movie is composed of shots just like this one, in which Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel and a young girl run away from nothing through the Pennsylvania countryside. Print this still out 300 times, turn it into a flip book and save yourself $10 ($20 with popcorn and parking!)

We open in Central Park, where a large crowd of people suddenly stop what they are doing, freeze in place for a moment, and then kill themselves in the quickest and most convenient method possible. News reports inform us that the phenomenon is sweeping through the city.

Cut to Philadelphia, where the school of science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) is being evacuated in response to what is perceived as a terrorist threat in NYC. Moore and a co-worker, Julian (John Leguizamo), plot to get their families out of Philadelphia and into the countryside, to wait out this weird suicide thing.

THAT'S IT, FOLKS. That's all that happens. The rest of the film follows Elliott, his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel), Julian and his daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez) as they wander around central Pennsylvania in a confused daze. They meet no one of consequence. They find out small details about what's going on via listening to radios or watching TV's, or from meeting random helpful strangers who introduce new information and then disappear.

I can't really express to you how many basic, fundamental errors Shyamalan makes here, strictly in terms of the screenplay and structure. Movies are driven by conflict. This is the single guiding principle for pretty much all drama - you introduce characters and set them at opposing goals. It's not really that hard. Everyone from Uwe Boll to the writers of "Two and a Half Men" have managed it.

Not only does The Happening lack any kind of tangible antagonist or enemy, it lacks any kind of conflict whatsoever. There are two types of scenes - scenes in which Wahlberg finds out something about the "happening" second-hand and scenes in which Wahlberg watches people in the middle distance kill themselves in increasingly laughable ways. You may notice, neither of those scenes involves any kind of conflict.

So you get a lot - A LOT - of shots of newscasters announcing that the plot is developing somewhere off-screen. And a lot of statements like this:

"Hey, everyone! I'm a stranger who has just walked here from 10 miles down the road. Everyone's dead down there! We're going to have to go some other way!"

(At one point, I shit you not, a random stranger shows Elliott a grisly death scene that apparently happened hours before on her iPhone! Are you fucking kidding me? He couldn't come up with a way to actually have anything happen on screen in his own fucking movie? Shyamalan's reduced to inserting footage into his own movie via YouTube?!)

It's also clear that the complete lack of conflict has confused and frustrated the actors. Deschanel has just given up on giving a performance, sleepwalking through the film. Wahlberg seems to be playing the character as a likable goofball, even though there's only one or two jokes and he should by all rights be traumatized. The most compelling bit of dialogue in the entire film is played between Wahlberg and a potted plant.

At a random point, the film just ends, without purpose or explanation or any kind of pay-off or showdown or denouement whatsoever. The last scene is meant to be chilling, but it's so obvious what's coming and so silly by that point that it actually plays like a joke. And that first credit - "A Film By M. Night Shyamalan" - is the punchline.

WARNING: POTENTIAL MINOR SPOILER, EVEN THOUGH THE MOVIE DOESN'T REALLY HAVE A GENUINE TWIST, AND THE PLOT IS OBVIOUS WITHIN THE FIRST 30 MINUTES OR SO

One final note on this film, because I think you all get the idea at this point. Unless Shyamalan is just playing dumb because it's easier, his understanding of the Theory of Evolution is seriously lacking. The way evolution is discussed in this film, by characters presented as scientists, is not only wrong but egregiously so, misleading in the extreme. I have read critics suggest that the film is an argument for Intelligent Design, but I think this is just a reaction to the fact that Shyamalan's misrepresentation of evolution and biology resembles the fabrications of ID proponents. Shyamalan's ignorance about evolution resembles Ben Stein's, but I'm not sure if they're working towards the same goal.

Suffice it to say, individual living things cannot spontaneously evolve in response to a predator. When biologists use a term like "rapid evolution," they're using the word "rapid" in the relative sense. It's like "taking fewer than several million years," not "by Wednesday." It's almost irresponsible to be this cavalier about representing bonafide scientific information, even in a silly fictional movie.

David Lynch on Where Ideas Come From

The Atlantic has put up this terrific video interview with director David Lynch, in which he discusses the nature of creativity and how he develops his ideas for films and TV. Enjoy.


Lynch rejects some of the traditional ideas about creative inspiration, particularly that writers should try to "write what they know" and that artists must suffer for their art. He seems to feel that writing and creating is less about having an initial spark of inspiration and more about having the talent and discipline to collect numerous, stray thoughts or ideas into a worthwhile/coherent whole. Anyway, the guy's a genius, and it's just fun to hear him pontificate about bubbles of consciousness and oceans of the transcendent for a few minutes.

[Hat tip, Matthew Yglesias]

Save the Clock Tower!

This afternoon, a fire at Universal Studios consumed some of the King Kong park tour attraction, the "New York Street" sets and much of Hill Valley from the Back to the Future films. (Mercifully, the film's most iconic landmark setting, the Clock Tower, was spared).

Reading this Slashfilm post about the fire's aftermath was actually kind of trippy. I mean, these are sets for movies that have already been made. They are no longer functional at all, but exist only as part of a guided tour showing people behind-the-scenes of how movies are made. And yet...there is a real emotional attachment to these places, because of their involvement in classic movies. I bet a lot more people would be upset to hear that the fictional Back to the Future clock tower burned down than some random actual clock tower in a real town.

I mean, they're going to rebuild the Hill Valley set. Rebuild a set for a movie that's long-finished! Just so they can drive tourists in front of it! Now that's real, authentic, behind-the-scenes movie magic!

Now here's where things get...really pomo. This Hill Valley set...it wasn't the real one from the movie.

The courthouse square set was not the original set used in the time-travel trilogy. Just after the sequels finished shooting, almost the entire square was burned down in the 1990 fire (which also took down New York Street). It was rebuilt from the original blueprints.

What's with all the horrific Universal Studio fires? Is that Backdraft attraction behind all of this? Because it's really not all that cool anyway...you guys could probably ditch it...

WTF MoMA?

No. No no no no no no no no.

One of the Museum of Modern Art's latest film acquisitions isn't an art-house experiment by Andy Warhol or Michelangelo Antonioni. It's the spy-action blockbuster "The Bourne Identity" and its sequels.

This week the museum is screening the films and hosting a panel discussion with "Bourne" director/producer Doug Liman and a noted neuroscientist to talk about memory, identity and the mysterious workings of the brain.

Really? Really? Not a David Gordon Green series? Or bringing over some Roy Andersson? Guy Maddin doesn't get a MoMA series...but you'll give one to the goddamn Bourne trilogy?

"You say the word 'action movie,' and everyone's standards go down," Liman said Tuesday.

And with good cause.

"And it was my goal with 'The Bourne Identity' to create a movie wherein the drama would hold up even if you took the action out."

Liman, who directed "Identity" and served as executive producer of sequels "Supremacy" and "Ultimatum," called the films' inclusion in the museum's renowned collection "a huge, huge honor."

Cinemaphiles have praised not only the movies' technical skill and heart-pounding pace, but their relatively realistic feel and character development as Bourne strives to find out who he is and why killers stalk him wherever he goes.

I mean...please. The Bourne movies aren't bad movies. Far from it. I actually think they're pretty good.

But COME ON, this is not, like, cinema as art. There are plenty of people actually making art films right at this very moment that are being ignored by this large museum as it praises the rare Hollywood action film that manages not to be horrifyingly, egregiously schlocky and embarrassing for all involved. It's like having the President come to your school to give you your "Best Attendance" medal.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Obviously, Harrison Ford's 2008 self, aged 65, can't carry an action-adventure film as credibly as his 1981 counterpart. But even though audiences will forgive a lot because of their fondness for Ford and the character of archaeologist Indiana Jones, they still want an action movie to star an action hero. That's just how these things are done.

I think Steven Spielberg had a plan to work around Harrison Ford's advanced age in this new Indy movie...and I think that plan was kind of a stupid one. Essentially, Spielberg has slowed the entire movie down considerably from its predecessors, taken his foot off the metaphorical gas, if you will, to make Ford's slower Indiana Jones appear dashing, energetic and spry by comparison.

I'm not kidding...I wish I were. Everything's slower about this Indiana Jones movie. The plot develops slower. The jokes and the big set pieces and the puzzles roll lazily by, separated by periods of relative inaction, rather than rattling off in a steady stream.

There's just something off about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The pieces are all there, it's well-directed and shot, and it's a lot of fun in spurts. I recognized the elements of an Indiana Jones movie immediately - the props, the music, the tone, the little tongue-in-cheek moments, some of the actors, the structure - but they didn't ever coalesce into anything that felt as compelling or immediate or delightful as a real Indy film.

It just never settles into place, and I think the issue here is the pacing. Raiders of the Lost Ark and Temple of Doom race along at breakneck speed. Crystal Skull kind of ambles around, takes its time developing its stately, familiar plot, then shuffles off. It's like getting a visit from an aging relative you rarely see around the holidays. You're happy to see them, and they probably brought you something even though they're on a fixed income, but all you really end up doing with them is sitting around discussing the Old Days. Great-Aunt Dot can't get around like she usedta...



To make sure I'm being clear...I don't think Harrison Ford or his age is the real problem here. He did just fine; it's a better performance, more lively and with more attention to small observations and details, than any he's given since The Fugitive.

No, it's as if the movie itself is old, like it's afraid it's going to break a hip if anything surprising, original, unexpected or sudden happens, or if a single concept is introduced that doesn't recall one of the previous Indiana Jones movies. The only twist in the whole thing comes about 5 minutes in, and it doesn't even take. You'll get more turnabouts and dramatics during a "Lost" episode's opening credits than this entire film. Seriously. That's not hyperbole.

The plot is, essentially, Last Crusade all over again. Dr. Jones (Ford...duh...) is informed by a '50s greaser named Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf) that an old friend (John Hurt) has disappeared while searching for a priceless artifact, in this case, a magical Crystal Skull that was treasured by an Ancient Mesoamerican civilization and hunted by a conquistador. Only if Jones can find this dead knight's final resting place will he be able to piece together the mystery of the Crystal Skull and find the temple to which he must deliver the prize. Ah, but, he's being chased by a brilliant, cruel Soviet psychic (Cate Blanchett) who wants to use the Skull to conquer the world.

That's all well and good, although there's a science-fiction element introduced at about the halfway point that feels really out-of-place in an Indiana Jones film. Is it an affront to organized religion that these films, which always vested their supernatural phenomenon in some version of God (either Jewish, Christian or Hindu), have now removed the Deus from their Machina? Or were screenwriter David Koepp, Lucas and Spielberg so tickled with the notion of introducing a '50s B-movie plot into a movie set in the '50s, they overlooked how this material would play in the Indiana Jones universe? Mulder and Scully will be pleased...but will anyone else?

This backstory's a bit more complicated than a search for, say, the Holy Grail, an object that's already relatively famous and easy to describe. ("Jesus' Cup!") Which works out well for Koepp and Spielberg, because they get to avoid shooting too many of these pesky action scenes the kids are so crazy about.

There's one big action set piece in the entire film - a really solid chase scene that culminates in a spill down a massive waterfall. It's pulled off nicely, and looks really good, and is exceptionally well shot by Janusz Kaminski and cut together by Michael Kahn. And I love the way Cate Blanchett delivers the line "Do svidaniya, Dr. Jones" before kicking Indy out of a moving truck. But it still feels kind of bloodless for the film's big action climax, and though it's far better than average for an American action film, it's nowhere near as memorable as the Mine Car Chase or the Bridge Climb in Temple of Doom, nor is it up to the standard of the tank battle in Last Crusade. And I'd rather watch b-roll taken on the set of Raiders than this chase or anything else in Crystal Skull.

The film's remaining action is incredibly brief, and frequently shot from far away. Spielberg has a tendency to place his actors in the foreground and show us extremely impressive feats happening in the middle distance, out of reach, letting us fill in the excitement going on for ourselves as the cast takes it easy. I'd imagine it simulates quite well the experience of being a tired middle-aged father of 3 on a long weekend day spent at Magic Mountain. "No, no, you kids run along and do Viper again...I'm just going to hang out here, maybe get a diet soda or something..."

Cate Blanchett's performance as the evil Irina Spalko is essentially note-perfect, but she isn't given nearly enough to do. (Plus, her final send-off is far far less awesome than that of any other Indy villain in history. Again, it's like Steve was afraid of over-exerting himself. EVERY Indy villain gets an sweet, gruesome comeuppance. It's goddamn tradition!)

Spalko's a better foil for Jones than Elsa Schneider in Last Crusade or Mrs. Spielberg in Temple of Doom, but she gets far far less development or screen time than either of these characters. We're at the point where it seems there's no kind of movie or character Cate Blanchett can't pull off...She's equally effective in high fantasy, period drama, serialized action-adventure and fucking Bob Dylan biopic. She was the only thing in the movie that left me wanting more.

Maybe that's not fair. I liked the film well enough, but the whole experience felt like going through the motions. Even as an audience member. I found myself chuckling at things I recognized, not things that were actually chuckle-worthy. Near the end, the film starts hinting that young Mutt will get his own spinoff adventure film series, but no one - from Indy to Mutt to Steven Spielberg to the fans in the audience - seemed terribly excited by the prospect. Unless they just don't want to get anyone too excited this close to nap time.

Speed Racer

A lot of movies, particularly in the last 10 years or so, have tried to blend the qualities of animation and traditional filmmaking, to create a kind of "live-action cartoon." As with most genre experiments, these films usually don't work. You tend to get stuff like Shoot 'Em Up that, in trying to mix and match the best elements of cartoons and live-action, wind up with a confused muddle that gets neither form right.

The Wachowski Brothers' Speed Racer is something else entirely. I'm not sure if this was even meant to be a live-action cartoon or not. It's impossible for me to tell you what Larry and Andy were going for. Unless the goal was to punish the cruel world that shunned their Matrix sequels, a sort of delayed cinematic revenge, I'm pretty sure they didn't get there.

The word "debacle" gets thrown around a lot these days. The Bush Administration. New Orleans Reconstruction. The Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis. But Speed Racer gives the word an entirely new meaning. This is not just one of the least pleasant and most inane movies I have seen, but also among the most confounding. Why make this movie? And for whom? And why do it like this? Just to prove that you can?



The story is labored and needlessly complex, involving corporate espionage, double-crosses, arcane racing rules and a whole shitload of backstory about dead brothers and vintage auto races. It sucks, and it makes the movie 140 minutes long, which is just entirely, insanely too long no matter how you slice it. Even if it were really good, that would be too long.

The basics are these: Speed Racer (Emile Hirsch, getting about as far from Into the Wild as possible) must compete in a variety of races to save his father's (John Goodman) racing company and defeat the insidious plot of corporate mogul Royalton (Roger Allam), who controls the world of professional racing and uses it for financial gain. He's helped by his girlfriend Trixie (Christina Ricci), his loyal and attentive mother (Susan Sarandon) and the mysterious and shadowy Racer X (Matthew Fox).

The Wachowskis created the "world" of the film using the same kind of technology that made Sin City and Sky Captain possible - shooting their actors in "green screen" sets and then plunking them down into an entirely computer-generated universe. In fairness, Speed Racer looks nothing like those movies. It looks as those movies may have looked if you had rubbed your eyes for two hours before watching them, then done a few bracing shots of absinthe.

I know that makes it sound good, and for a few quick seconds, during some of the racing scenes, it almost comes together into something. Every rare once in a while, I could feel the movie start to look less like a video game and almost maybe kind of get cinematic for a moment, before flipping around and turning back into an indecipherable jumble of brain-meltingly lame jokes and bright bursts of primary colors.

What I'm saying is, this movie doesn't look like any other movies, but perhaps that's because it looks like the stupidest piece of fucking trash I have ever seen. There's a reason no other director has used this technology to turn the movie screen into a coloring book that's been attacked by 8 ADHD-infected toddlers armed with a garbage bag full of magic markers and crystal meth. Because it's a bad idea.

In still shots, like the one above, Speed Racer looks almost beautiful, or at least pleasingly candy-colored and imaginative. But the movie is edited at such breakneck speed, and so constantly over-saturated with light and color and busyness, it just becomes an eyesore after about five seconds, and even turned kind of nauseating by the conclusion. The Wachowskis prove that actual showmanship and directorial prowess has nothing to do with technology or budgets or ambition or a willingness to go-for-broke.

Actually being a director is about having a keen eye, some basic visual sense for framing and composition and the confidence in your own ability to not show the audience everything you could possibly show them. Filmmaking is largely about making decisions about what to show and what to leave out. The Wachowskis want to leave nothing out, they will spin a camera at top speed for 140 minutes to show you every inch of the dazzling world they've created, and that's why they keep proving themselves to be sub-standard filmmakers. Again and again.

Take the sequence set at the elaborate, massive car factory. We spend about 10 minutes zooming down a long hallway taking in row after row after endless row of machinery, employees, car parts, equipment, and on and on and on, and in the end, it all becomes an indistinguishable blur, like a forgettable PlayStation cut scene. A movie like Monsters Inc. or even the Tim Burton Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (of which I was not a huge fan) does so much more with so much less - a hint at the size and mystery of the factory is more tantalizing than a constantly moving, buzzy but ultimately senseless 10 minute sequence. And because the activity going on is not itself interesting - it's essentially a tour of a car factory, albeit a fantastically large and, of course, candy-colored car factory - the entire purpose is lost, and the audience naturally stops paying close attention to what they are seeing.

Those are just the visuals. We haven't even discussed quite possibly the lamest, most obnoxious, poorly conceived script of the year. The dialogue, as in every script yet written by Larry and Andy, is tone-deaf and atrocious. Some basic elements of screenwriting, like foreshadowing, are so clunky and awkward here, it's genuinely embarrassing for veteran filmmakers.

(I mean, the scene where Trixie tells Speed Racer that, one day, she hopes he'll win the Grand Prix and they'll kiss in front of all the screaming fans? The 8 year old behind me could tell that was going to come back around, even though he had fallen asleep by the time it actually happened).

Surely I can't be the only one who has noticed that these two have zero sense of humor whatsoever. Bound is actually kind of a cool, funny movie, but it's really just because Joe Pantoliano figured out how ludicrous it was and decided to have some fun with the material. The entire Matrix trilogy is, essentially, joke-free.

Here, they've been given the task of adapting a silly children's cartoon that features a monkey as a main character. So you know that's not going to go too well. But still, the comedy in the film is absolutely gobsmackingly hideous.

It gives me no pleasure to bash a child actor, particularly because it's surely not his fault, but Paulie Litt as Spritle gives perhaps the worst child performance I've ever seen - he mugs uncontrollably, and his line readings are clearly coached. They might as well have just hired a stage mother to come on camera and perform the part as she hopes her child might.

This sounds mean, but I'll say again...This isn't the fault of young Paulie Litt. This is why you have directors. They're supposed to be there to try and get an actual performance out of this kid, rather than just having him jump around and generally be as irritating as any one human being could possibly make themselves. If he's not up to the kind of performance their movie requires, they're supposed to hire someone else. I harbor no ill will towards young Master Litt, but I wanted to punch him in the face at several points during tonight's screening.

I could keep going, but what's the point? Nothing at all works about Speed Racer. It's painful from start to finish. I actually found it a grueling experience, difficult to sit through and intensely annoying. Oh, and did I mention it's 140 goddamn minutes long? WTF? It's fucking Speed Racer! That's like every episode of the show placed back-to-back!