The Limey

Steven Soderbergh's The Limey might be the acid test entry in his filmography, by which I mean any old fool might faintly recognize names like Traffic or Che, but The Limey is curiously absent in discussions of the director's work even, as I'm increasingly finding, it's one of his most popular films among the fans. I don't know what it is about this movie, but you need to know the cinephile's equivalent of a Masonic handshake just to get a wink and a nod pointing you to some backroom where a man says, "That Limey's good, innit?"

Why it's so bizarrely underrepresented escapes me, as The Limey plays like a captivating cross between his mainstream crime thriller Out of Sight mixed with his more dangerous and experimental side. That more avant-garde element does not interfere with the film's enjoyment, however, instead enhancing the tension and emotion of a story of a man looking for vengeance for his daughter's death.

The man in question is Wilson (Terence Stamp) who, if you are too stupid to figure this out for yourself, is English. Recently released from prison, he travels to Los Angeles after receiving word of his family tragedy. The official report says she died in a crash on Mullholland, but he doesn't accept this explanation. Maybe he already knows something we don't, as The Limey leaps forward and backward, the fractured thoughts and memories of its protagonist fluttering across the screen without any concrete sense of a timeline; often, one thought plays over another one, so the sound of a shower plays over Wilson on a plane.

This inventive style of placing the film's sense of time directly in someone's head isn't as fully formed as Christopher Nolan would depict it with Memento, but it's an interesting progression from Soderbergh's playfulness time distortion in Out of Sight. It also adds dimensions to what would otherwise be a routine revenge thriller: Wilson tracks down leads, beats up hired thugs and stalks Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda), the record producer who was dating Jenny when she died. He uncovers a drug operation, contends with a hitman, but all of these things are means only to the end of the plot.

Where The Limey excels, however, is in the subtext of these actions. Terence Stamp speaks in a thick accent spouting indecipherable Cockney slang, but he's also a heartbroken father just looking, in his own, hyperviolent way, for some answers. He's also the only person who handles himself in a fight with any aplomb, disposing of the tanned, buff youth Valentine and his partner Avery (Barry Newman) send to do their dirty work. It's a display of virility and fortitude in elder years every bit as invigorating as a dose of Viagra.

At times, though, Soderbergh's narrative flourishes distract from the story. A subplot involving the DEA is so murky it works neither as a part of Wilson's personal story of toppling Valentine nor as a potential commentary on the agency (Wilson does hypothesize to the agent in charge that Valentine probably offered them some sort of deal, be it bribes for leniency or information for safety, but his spoken musings simply fade from his lips, never to inform any other part of the story). The hitman, Stacy (Nicky Katt), fits into the theme of the grizzled oldster emerging victorious in a battle with the pampered youth whose muscles and menace are just for show, but one still must wonder how and when Avery ever first came into contact with this dopey buffoon and why on Earth he would hire him for something as serious and discreet as an orchestrated killing.

Nevertheless, The Limey is a wonderfully straightforward revenge story made non-linear through directorial touches which call attention to themselves but in a sly way that I'm quickly becoming used to with Soderbergh's work. By pitting two aged icons from across the pond, both known for "dangerous" (in that Hollywood sense) youth images, against each other, Soderbergh tests the mettle of the rebellion of the '60s in its later years, and it is interesting to note that the villain attempts to mask his own age by dressing as a younger man and dating barely adult women. That image of chasing youth is juxtaposed with Soderbergh's wildly inventive, oddly touching usage of footage from Ken Loach's 1967 debut Poor Cow, in which a young Terence Stamp starred. The story of Stamp's character in that film provides the background for Wilson, whose youthful charm in that film rubs like sandpaper against the terrifying and implacable vision of that man in his 60s.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Wes Anderson is one of a handful of interesting, unique directors working in America today whose work is marginalized by that most useless of criticisms: that he is a "style over substance" filmmaker. I don't know when bringing something visual to the most visually stimulating of all media became something worthy of derision but, while sometimes the phrase is used appropriately, those who casually toss it out at any film that dares look interesting should be forced to sit through a Dogme 95 marathon so they can appreciate what aesthetic means to a film's enjoyment and how fucking terrible movies are without it. Having said that, I'm far from the world's biggest Wes Anderson fan, having previously loved on The Royal Tenenbaums and found the rest of his oeuvre, even Rushmore, to be excellent in places and spotty in others. His last two features, the soulless Life Aquatic and the on-the-nose Darjeeling Limited, were neither outright bad, but for all of Life Aquatic's insanity and Darjeeling's back-to-basics vibrancy, I found little in either worth remembering; neither was an exercise in style over substance, but the substance communicated through their styles held no interest for me.

It is with some trepidation, then, that I admit how much I enjoyed his latest work, Fantastic Mr. Fox, as it might seem that I'm choosing a simple kid's film over his more complex works. Well, yes, this is a kid's film, as straightforward as entries in the genre must be, but it also delves into the key theme of Anderson's corpus: a dysfunctional, emotionally distant family and the extent its members will go to for each other. He does not so much gut Roald Dahl's story as stuff every crevice with his own sensibilities, stretching Dahl's whimsical story into a post-ironic bit of family fun, appealing to your 5-year-old and your embittered hipster teenager.

His Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) is an egotistical chicken thief, so full of himself that he even acknowledges it at one point. His wife Felicity (Meryl Streep), forces him to give up his trade when the two narrowly escape death in one engagement and she reveals her pregnancy. 12 fox-years later, Mr. Fox writes opinion columns for the local paper that no one reads and has an uneasy relationship with his son Ash (Jason Schwartzman), a barely held-together wad of fur and rage. Fox hates his gray flannel suit existence and longs for the fire of his youth, so he moves his family out of the ground and into a tree, ostensibly for the freedom of sunshine but in reality for the new home's proximity to three farms owned by Boggis, Bunce and Bean and their irresistible products within.

The world that Anderson and his animators created for Mr. Fox and the other characters to roam has a pop-up book quality, evidently something artificial yet something you want to reach out and feel anyway. When the camera moves, it typically does so sideways, moving through rooms and layers in the inventive underground world of the animals as if scanning the panels of a comic book. Each of these areas, and the characters who inhabit them, bursts with Anderson's visual acumen: overwhelmingly bright colors, right-angle arrangements, symmetry. Anderson is a director both praised and criticized for his meticulous compositions, so what better medium for him to explore than stop-motion animation, the most involving method of building and photographing a world from scratch?

I'm tip-toeing around discussing the film as, pound for pound, this is the funniest picture in Anderson's canon. It's always tricky when a filmmaker or actor moves from working primarily in the R-rated field to children's entertainment -- how cringeworthy it is when the subject of "making the kids proud of me" raises its serpentine head in interviews -- but Anderson tackles the shift with extra cheek; how many PG films (PG only because some of the characters, as they must in an Anderson movie, smoke) not only broach the subject of existentialism but say the word aloud? The director also replaces every possible swear word with the word "cuss," and I suspect that he wrote the script without children in mind and censored himself later, because the word is bandied about quite often, including as a part of combinations such as "clustercuss." I'd like to see this method used on TV instead of the annoying and useless bleeping that grates the ears.

The Darjeeling Limited had its moments of character insight, but Fantastic Mr. Fox gets Anderson back on firm emotional ground. Mr. Fox's ennui is deeply felt (and his comments on the non-readership of his column is a subtle commentary, perhaps, on our own failing papers), and the caustic relationship between Ash, who projects his insecurities and self-loathing outward, and essentially everyone else is as revealing of his inner concerns as it is blisteringly funny. His exchanges with cousin Kristofferson in particular are ripe for comedy, as Kristofferson is everything that Ash isn't: athletic, handsome and, it seems, well-liked by Mr. Fox. These meaty lead performances are bolstered by a manic cast of supporters voiced by the likes of Anderson alumni Owen Wilson and Bill Murray, all of whom find that usual balance between the goofier aspects of the directors characters and their reserved, ultra-dry style.

However, a few items stuck in my craw after leaving the theater, and I still can't get over some of Anderson's choices after sleeping on my thoughts. Mr. Fox, Ash, Kristofferson, the opossum Kylie, they're all so much fun; so why are all the female characters uptight and as flat as Anderson's storybook compositions? I understand that the director is evoking a bit of a '50s suburban feel with the layouts of the animals' houses, but why did he feel the need to port over the vision of the domesticated housewife as well? Felicity knows that her husband resumed thieving upon moving near the farms, she only offers a few words of stern caution to try to stop him. When Mr. Fox places the entire community in peril by angering the farmers, Felicity only gets to run through one of those "Oh, I love you but you can be so silly sometimes!" harsh speeches that isn't so harsh. Speaking of the farmers: why are all the humans voiced by British and Irish actors when all of the animals are voiced by American ones? Yes, the composition of the farms brings to mind the English countryside where Dahl set the story, but there's no explanation for the clear difference. Perhaps it's a further distinction between animals and humans, but considering that the two groups can understand and converse with one another, it just seems like a lazy excuse for Anderson to use some actors he liked. And I don't even know what the hell Willem Dafoe thought he was doing as an evil rat who sounds as though he came from New Orleans, though I admit I liked his mix of zaniness and menace.

Nevertheless, Fantastic Mr. Fox is a terrific return to form for Anderson, lacking the depth of his best work but making up for it with his first film to allow you to sit back and enjoy the visuals without having to worry about the story's complexity whacking you in the head every five minutes. And when I said that this was as much for the kids as the indie crowd, I meant it: yes, no child will catch the extended reference to The Third Man of a sequence in sewers, and they'll likely not catch the potential nod to Toy Story in the form of a milk (or apple, as the case may be) crate prison. But they'll have as much fun with its irreverence as adults, perhaps more so -- I was turned on to Monty Python at 10 and my parents still don't see its appeal, and they grew up in the proper time period for it. Anderson's humor may be smug, but he derives laughs directly from how smug the characters are, and nobody can spot a phony and laugh at him like a child.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence threw me when I first watched it last year; a fan of both Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick, who began the project after reading Brian Aldiss' Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, I spent much of the film looking for the moments I could readily identify as belonging to either director. It was a rookie mistake, an outgrowth of a dependency on auteur theory to explain away the film and a distraction from the film's actual content and themes. I also tuned out the much-debated final section of the film, buying into the hype (before I'd even read it) that somehow it wasn't worth watching. Upon finishing the film, I nonchalantly popped it back in the Netflix sleeve and sent it back for the next movie in my queue.

Yet certain aspects stuck with me, ideas that I didn't pay attention to while watching the film now gnawing their way through the eroding memory of my "spot the auteur" game and nagging at me to give it another go. What really reinvigorated my interest, however, was Jonathan Rosenbaum's epic, 4000-word treatise on the film, entitled "The Best of Both Worlds." It remains my favorite article of his, and one of my absolute favorite pieces of film criticism. It is my go-to counterargument to those who argue that Rosenbaum is just some pretentious ass incapable of being pleased, using his once-limitless word count at the Chicago Reader to inform everyone how much smarter he was than us. It's also the article I use to introduce neophytes to his work. I could go on about what I love about this beautiful piece, but to do so would turn this review of a film into a rave of a rave that could spiral out of control and spark yet more discussions about my rave of his rave until Charlie Kaufman knocks at my door demanding a royalty payment.

Rosenbaum's praise of the film caused me to reevaluate my own indifference to it and, setting it aside long enough for some of the specifics to fade as to not influence my experience with the film, I at last returned to A.I. Rarely have I been so pleased to discover just how wrong I was.

A.I. opens with the sight and sound of the ocean, serene waves that take on an ominous tone when a narration explains that, in the future, melting ice caps destroyed numerous major cities, displacing millions and leading to mass starvation in poorer countries. The areas that still enjoy some level of prosperity ensure their continuing riches by licensing pregnancies to maintain population levels. With the lowered populace reducing labor, robots become a staple of city life. But Professor Hobby (William Hurt) aspires to the next level of robotics. He dreams of androids that do not only look like humans and experience sensory stimuli but emote.

A year later, an employee at Hobby's company, Henry (Sam Robards) and his wife Monica (Frances O'Connor) suffer the pain of their child's illness. Cocooned in a pod reminiscent of the hibernation chambers of 2001 or Alien, young Martin must stay in suspended animation until a cure for his rare disease can be found. This situation makes the couple prime test subjects for Hobby's latest innovation: David. Henry brings home what appears to be an 11-year-old boy, but Monica immediately understands what the boy really is and shouts for it to leave.

With this minimal setup, Spielberg crafts not only his most thought-provoking film (it is admittedly up against slim competition) but one of the most unabashedly philosophical films to ever be produced for mass consumption (and make no mistake, this is very much a film meant for a large audience). This first section of the 150-minute feature is entirely based on emotional development between the "child" and his new "mommy." Monica is repulsed by the machine at first, terrified by the stiff, servile messages coming from this utterly realistic thing. Yet she slowly becomes accustomed to the boy, until at last she agrees to program him with code words that will fully activate his humanistic programming (once this bonding process is done, David cannot be returned to the company without being destroyed), and the moment that David looks up with suddenly softer features and calls Monica "Mommy" is as breathtaking in its simplicity and direct impact as the appearance of the brachiosaur in Jurassic Park is in its epic grandeur.


The first act also establishes an amazing unity between two disparate styles of filmmaking, between Kubrick's often bleak philosophical and anthropological concerns and Spielberg's emotional directness and his notion of cinema as a means of exhilaration and positivity. One of the employees at Hobby's initial presentation broaches a serious question she tags as moral but is equally existential, asking "If a robot could genuinely love a person, what responsibility does that person hold toward that Mecha in return?" Hobby ducks the question by alluding to the story of creationism (that God created humans to love him, with the unspoken allusion to John 3:14's declaration of God's love of His creation), but sets up one of the basic issues the film addresses and asks us to answer.

Monica, driven by maternal instincts, dotes upon this robot as if her child, but Henry, who was so excited by the invention and pressured his wife into keeping David, sours when confronted with the fully programmed version, put-off by David's sudden humanity (this depiction of a father's excitement with the idea of a kid growing into a resentment and absence when the child finally arrives shows Spielberg getting to the heart of his theme of father-child relationships). When the Swintons' real son Martin (Jake Thomas) returns home, David receives his first exposure to human cruelty. I feel that Martin is somewhat justified in hating David, considering that his parents essentially replaced him with this robot while he lied in cryostasis, but he manipulatesDavid's programmed honesty and servility into turning the poor android into an unwittingly terrifying being, at times perceived by the Swintons as a Chucky doll of the 22nd century.

At last, Martin's schemes go to far, and the father orders David's return to the factory for destruction, but the mother cannot bring herself to kill her child, even if he's not technically her child or even alive. She instead takes him to a forest and abandons him with his animatronic toy bear, Teddy. It's a heartbreaking moment, as David displays the extent to which he can feel true emotions and love.

After a fade-out, Spielberg completely shifts gears, and the second act of the film investigates not an individual family who would order something like David but the society that is enthralled with Mechas. The director, working with Chris Baker's 600 pre-production illustrations, crafts a stupefying metropolis called Rouge City that makes Ridley Scott's vision of the consumerist overload of Blade Runner's Los Angeles look like an Amish community. Its epileptic blend of Scott's nightmarish futuristic vision, Las Vegas and the Pleasure Island segment of Disney's Pinocchio, Rouge City is as far away from the idyllic wealthy suburbs where we met David but linked by a nonplussed acceptance of robots among humans. Spielberg's visual evocation of Pinocchio is one of his more sly moves here, lining up nicely with the story's inexorable link to the story of the puppet who became a real boy.

Rouge City

Pleasure Island

Even the character of Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), the first character introduced in this new segment, can be directly tied to David and his quest to be loved. Just as David was an experiment for humans to project love upon an ideal -- not only might unlicensed couples be allowed to have a child, it would always be stuck in that period of total and unconditional love, never growing old and moving away -- Gigolo Joe is manufactured to cater to every aspect of the physical aspect of human love. Both are empty shells who can only project their ability to love at the expense of any other identifiable traits; when the abandoned David meets Joe and tells him of his quest to find the Blue Fairy of the Pinocchio tale, Joe, on the run after the bitter husband of one of his clients framed him for her murder, offers to tag along to seduce her.

Their search for the Blue Fairy is fraught with danger, as a subsection of society views the rise of Mechas as a threat to the species. In the film's only glaring misstep, both David and Joe are rounded up for a "Flesh Fair," a Thunderdome-esque exposition of Luddite savagery. Well, I say Luddite; everyone in attendance has their own futuristic gadgets, but they destroy any Mechas they can get their hands on in some zealous rage of self-preservation. Where this sequence goes wrong is in its visualization: the Flesh Fair is little more than a motocross, a rock concert(!)(?) and a warped public hanging square all in one, populated only, it seems, by shitkicking working class buffoons, none so poor that we might infer that robotics drove them out of work but displaying typical redneck bloodlust. The scene only redeems itself at its end, when its most eager participant (Brendan Gleeson) trots out David, the first robot to genuinely fulfill the emotional roles of a human, the crowd is so struck by his realism that they refuse to allow him to be destroyed. Does that mean that even a mongoloid mob such as this has some basic civility when confronted with something so well-made they cannot distinguish from a human? Or are they just so collectively dumb that they cannot fathom a machine being made like this despite all their violence predicated on the fear of something like David existing?

The central issue affecting David is the dividing line between "Orga," organic beings, and "Mecha," the robots. It's revealing that the humans, even the ones most adamantly opposed to the technology, do not simply say "man" and "machine," for the Mechas have grown into a type of existence that cannot be differentiated from a humans with the same facility as, say, animals, which technically are Orga. The robot servants and the pleasure bots like Joe can all carry out but one function -- when you strip away his ability for minor independence, the same applies to David -- but they can all reason, react to pain, find a certain pleasure in their lives, even if it's only a programmed response. In an early scene, David sits at the dinner table in his "stock" condition, his emotional programming still unactivated, and suddenly plays a bit of a trick on Henry and Monica bursts into loud laughter, causing both of the humans to laugh just as boisterously. It's a light-hearted and funny scene, but it brings with it a question: the machine David, not even yet programmed to achieve his most human-like behavior, can laugh at something he finds amusing. What, then, separates his mechanical response from the supposedly organic one of Monica and Henry?


Perhaps as a result of Spielberg's framing, though certainly a key aspect of the story, David is more sympathetic than any of the humans we meet; even Monica does not put up a struggle when the patriarchal Henry orders David destroyed, and her idea of a compromise is to simply dump a machine programmed to be a 11-year-old in a forest surrounded by humans who destroy everything they find and hope for the best. When David and Joe use a super-information center called Dr. Know (voiced by a loopy but not obnoxious Robin Williams) to find the Blue Fairy at "the end of the world" (a Manhattan covered by the risen seas), we discover the information was planted in Dr. Know by Hobby to reclaim his invention for analysis. Hobby delights at David's misery and the horrific jealousy he displays when Hobby introduces him to a copy of another David unit, which results in a violent (and futile) act of aggression to prove his individuality.

The final section of the film, set 2000 years after David runs away from Hobby and finds the Coney Island Blue Fairy deep in the ocean, is where even the film's fans suddenly scream in outrage. The first time I watched it, I had no idea what the creatures, seemingly made as much from pure energy as any flesh or metal, actually were; in retrospect, it's easy to tell that they're Mechas because of a sharp visual clue Spielberg gave us early in his out-of-focus, distorted introductory shot of David. The film up to this point pitted Orga against Mecha, but these humanoid Supermechas, wandering a frozen landscape long after humans went extinct, make the distinction meaningless. They scan David's memories and offer to reconstruct a vision of Monica to be with for a single day, allowing him his chance at happiness while giving them a window to study mankind through his experiences.


Many pointed to this segment as saccharine, Spielbergian fluff, though everyone involved is quick to point out that this coda was always in Kubrick's idea of the film. And, frankly, I don't see what people are talking about; David's day with Monica is fun and happy and carefree, yes, but it is also hollow, a programmed emotional stimuli no different than the one David himself was made to provide. In Rosenbaum's review, he noted that the issue broached at Hobby's first meeting tackles the idea of whether a robot and a human could share a mutually loving relationship, but the film never tackles the question of whether robots could be so humanistic that they might love each other. I respectfully disagree; the film revolves around the idea that human love has given way to mechanical, programmed affection, and though the real Monica's love of David obviously does not extend to that of a real human, she is devastated to leave him in the forest. Furthermore, David and Joe share a loving friendship, reliant upon one another for safety, and there is a haunting moment between them as an electromagnet snares Joe and he bids farewell to David with the hauntingly existential "I am...I was." David's vision of Monica at the end professes her unconditional love of David, as affecting but ultimately hollow a display of emotion as David provided to the real version.

This harsh juxtaposition reveals the "shotgun marriage," as Rosenbuam dubs it, between Spielberg and Kubrick auterial concerns. Spielberg's films are about the individual and the emotional resonance of that one person above all else, including accuracy or honest self-appraisal; I still love his Jaws to death, but as a young adult grown out of childhood I'm now somewhat put-off by its subtext, that people can always overcome giant obstacles, even if it means recklessly killing it without ever acknowledging a less violent solution. Kubrick's, on the other hand, are about the loss of individualism into the unified whole of society, usually in a satiric manner but occasionally quite serious (in 2001, the individual is absorbed into the obelisk to further the evolution of our species). In the film's final moments, we discover that the entire movie was a flashback of sorts, played for the Supermechas just as the projectionist played the film for us. Just as we feed off of David's emotions, so too do the future mechas take his most personal memories and project them to their curious society. In the combination of two wildly different styles, scenes such as this provide the most honest look at the methods and ideas of both directors.

Yet for all of its intelligence, all of its jaw-dropping visual splendor -- perhaps Spielberg's always acute visual sense resonated even more than his work on other films because the images are put in service of some genuine meaning -- A.I. succeeds because of its protagonist. Haley Joel Osment is now remembered for whispering "I see dead people" and for not escaping the aftermath of Pay It Forward (his tiny adolescent body just didn't have the strength to push the rubble of that film's horrific collapse off himself), but his performance here never hits a false note. He is initially creepy and overbearing, but transitions effortlessly into an adorable boy who is as lovable, fragile and naïve as any other kid. Osment himself decided upon the excellent idea of never blinking to reveal his artificiality, a wry character tic that proves unexpectedly heartrending at the end when David, himself revived by the Mechas and given only a day with a reincarnation with his mother, lies in her arms and closes his eyes, off "to that place where dreams are born."

Second Thoughts: Adventureland

Nearly all of the reviews of contemporary reviews I've posted on this blog from its inception leading up to about July were submitted in tandem to Auburn's student newspaper, The Plainsman. The Plainsman set a 500-count word limit (admittedly a flexible one) on my submissions, which is why so many of my reviews for new movies are so short in comparison to my views of older ones. For a while, I tinkered with some of these reviews, editing them surreptitiously to add elements to flesh out the restricted observations I wrote for the Plainsman, but I've decided that, if I have enough I wish to change an opinion of one of my previous posts, or simply find new aspects of a film to discuss that I overlooked, I'll simply collect them into an addendum such as this.

My initial reaction to Adventureland was positive but not exactly effusive, yet it stuck with me as much as the films I considered the best of the year. The more I thought about it, the more I found new touches to enjoy, and when I finally saw it again, I unreservedly adored it. What stuck out that eventually made the good seem great, and why did it take me so long to realize it?


I was idly perusing some of the blogs I follow recently and stumbled across The Film Doctor's review of the film, in which he compares Adventureland and its ability to evoke its time period with Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused. An apt comparison, and one I'd supplement with another teen retrospective: Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous. None of these films is perfect, yet they are all perfect evocations of a certain period, because they capture that which is most rare, the spiritual unity of youth -- zeitgeist isn't quite the right word -- that manifests itself, appropriately enough, through our primary method of communication: music. Adventureland sports one of the few soundtracks these days that is neither a shallow nod to the big hits designed to sell CDs nor a collection of insufferable hipster semi-obscurity that blends together into one stale, hard-to-swallow acoustic lump; containing tracks by Hüsker Dü, The Cure, The Replacements and numerous, bountifully, gloriously numerous, tracks from Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground, Adventureland's soundtrack reflects Mottola's approach to the film: commercially indifferent, unabashed honesty.

Honesty is central to the appeal of these films. Crowe's stranger-than-fiction life story, Linklater's more laid-back, quasi-anthropological examination, and this occasionally downbeat reminiscence all tackle the same ultimate subject with contrasting moods, yet none lies to us. Crowe's film is tinged with his low-key, fleshed-out Spielbergian sentimentality (though I would argue that, if Rolling Stone paid you at 15 to follow the Allman Brothers on tour, you'd be a bit nostalgic too), a movie in which a busload of people can suddenly burst into a sing-along of Elton John's "Tiny Dancer" without the barest trace of irony. Mottola's is flecked with a reserved embrace of its period, one that is not so quick to spotlight the fonder memories that it forgets and forgives the bad times. (Linklater's is more emotionally-neutral behind the camera, allowing the actors and situations to create a mood).

How, then, are they all flip sides of the same coin (and can three objects fulfill a metaphor of something with two sides? Well, maybe Linklater is the thin middle width connecting them)? Adventureland presents us with a post-graduate hero without any doubts concerning his future. An English major seeking to get into grad school to study journalism, James Brennan dreams of writing travelogues that show the real cities that he visits. He speaks of Charles Dickens' writings on prisons and sanitariums with breathless reverence, as if he can't believe he might get the chance to read them again someday, much less write articles in their vein.

Unlike Benjamin Braddock, the post-grad sophisticate of The Graduate, James' life plans are altered not by a sudden crisis of confidence and insecurity but through the financial troubles of his parents. He saved up for half the cost of a summer in Europe, but his parents (played by superb character actors Wendie Malick and Jack Gilpin) can no longer afford to pay their half. Too, they strongly hint that they'll be unable to pay his tuition for Columbia University. So, James looks high and low for a job. Set in 1987, Adventureland hits strikingly close to home today; financial troubles threaten his ability to continue his education, and no one seems to be hiring for him to get a job to pay his own way.

At last, James finds a potential opening at a local theme park. As Mottola rides just in front of James' bicycle, a gargantuan roller coaster looms in the background, a subtle feint as James keeps riding until he moves farther away from that impressive attraction into the heart of Adventureland. This park is dilapidated and childish, a traveling fair that broke down one day and simply rooted where it stopped. James enters the park's office and accepted without a glance at a resumé by owner Bobby (Bill Hader) and his wife Paulette (Kristen Wiig). James requests a job at one of the rides, but Bobby insists that James is "a games guy," and we sense that this is in some way a put-down.


Games proves to be a dull job indeed, with James standing at various booths lackadaisically separating bored children and couples from their money with rigged games, his only important task to prevent anyone from winning a Giant-Ass Panda. He loses his charge at knifepoint, but no one seems to mind, and in the process he meets fellow games jockey Em (Kristen Stewart), whose striking green eyes have a curious vacuity to them that does not suggest dimness but a genuine sense of angst and a lack of inner direction. Em isn't nearly as literate as James, but she's the next best thing: someone with killer taste in music. Yes, James and Em bond over hip, off-mainstream tunes, but Mottola navigates in between the Scylla and Charybdis that is hipster irony and an over-reliance on music without losing a single shipmate. James, a virgin, is attracted to her because he sees her own vulnerability not as a weakness to be exploited but a sign of kinship borne out through their mutual appreciation of depressive pop (and fellas, if you ever run into a lady with Big Star records, just get down one on knee and propose on the spot).

Yet where James' troubles largely extend to a sudden financial upheaval, Em's life story is considerably more tangled. She lost her mother to cancer only two years ago, only for her father to remarry the woman he was having an affair with, an image-obsessed socialite named Francy who lost her hair due to the stress of her first divorce and its impact upon her circle of gossipers ("My mom loses her hair in chemo, and he starts fucking a bald woman," Em says on the verge of tears). Her shock-induced anomie led her into the arms of Connell (Ryan Reynolds), the park's maintenance man who inspires awe in the collegiate workers despite the fact that he works maintenance for a crap theme park into his '30s and hides from his wife in his mother's basement. Connell shops a story about of him playing on stage with Lou Reed once, though he never quite gets the titles of the songs they played right.

"Stewart plays a variation of what The Onion A.V Club terms the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl:” that is, a female character who serves to bring the male protagonist to some sort of epiphany and/or stable relationship at the expense of any characteristics of her own," I wrote in my original review. What an asinine misreading of the character. Having finally acquired a copy of this film for my home collection, I watched Adventureland twice in rapid succession and realized something: Mottola reverses the gender roles of Eisenberg and Stewart. James is the fairly stable one, a genuinely nice person less concerned with losing his virginity than losing it to someone he loves. Em, on the other hand, is at a crossroads, unsure of what she wants out of college and burying her grief in passionless sex with a handsome-but-pathetic loser. When confronted with someone who truly, deeply cares about her, his earnest kindness terrifies her

This aspect of her character only stands out more when compared to the other noteworthy young lady in the film, the worshipped Lisa P (Margarita Levieva). The men of Adventureland gawk at her, clad in a torn T-shirt, gaudy and oversized earrings and everything else that signified why the '80s were absolutely, unequivocally the worst, as if a goddess. Where Em listens to haunting and powerful college rock, Lisa P dances mechanically the park's incessant usage of Falco's "Rock Me Amadeus," and once again Mottola communicates everything through the music. For everyone else in the park, "Rock Me Amadeus," is used in a manner not unlike the military's usage of blaring rock music to force Manuel Noriega's surrender, weeding out those lacking the fortitude to withstand its constant barrage; her vacant swaying is seductive only in this atmosphere of desperation and sidelined dreams. Lisa P becomes the unlikely fallback for Em, as James is so enamored with Em and so sure that he has no chance with Lisa that he attains that perverse sort of anti-confidence that allows him to be himself around a girl who has never witnessed anything other than obsequious falsity from the men in her life, thus captivating her. When she spreads gossip about Em around the park, however, James sees the Lisa P that the audience sees, a cold succubus trapped in her own sense of superiority and the warped dialectic of her hedonistic, Reaganomic, consumerist pop image and her deluded take on Catholic morality. Her ruse discovered, she simply slinks back into her horrid dance as if repairing her trap for the next victim, one who hopefully won't escape her clutches.

As all romantic comedies must, Adventureland comes to the section of the story in which some misunderstanding or revelation threatens the relationship, but those that plague the budding couple here have been skillfully set up over the course of the film, not suddenly dumped upon us with someone entering a room at the wrong time or with one ill-timed outburst, and thus their time apart can tug at the heart strings without smacking of manipulation and the dénouement can be happy without sinking into schmaltz.

Adventureland can be easily (and, for the most part, lazily) connected to two other recent youth movies by the cast and crew members they share, chiefly Superbad (Mottola) and the Twilight films (Stewart). Working with Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's script, Mottola's Superbad wasn't exactly dishonest -- its most absurd moment, involving an ancillary trip to a creepy house party, was purportedly toned down from Rogen and Goldberg's memory of a similar occurrence because they felt that it was so weird no one would buy it -- but its maxims of growing up, and the fear of leaving high school* were distinctly separate from its menstrual-blood-and-dick-jokes linear comedy plot. Adventureland, by contrast, organically fuses its low-key comedy and its off-Graduate tale of post-collegiate uncertainty. Superbad of course also brings up the inevitable Cera-Eisenberg debate, and while they're clearly playing much of the same root character (and not just in these two movies), Eisenberg's James is appealing where Cera's Evan could be nasty and spiteful.

Stewart's Twilight connection is notable because here, too, she plays a morose, sexually confused young woman (albeit promiscuous where Bella is chaste) presented with the choice between an awkward but sincere young kindred spirit or an older, creepily dependent aggressor. Where the two differ, and differ severely, is in Stewart's performance. Her Em is vulnerable and insecure, but she is never the helpless (and hapless) creature that she must portray as Bella Swan. Em can be quite confident at times, publicly shaming a Catholic co-worker who drunkenly made out with the Jewish Joel and subsequently used his religion as a means to nip any lingering feelings on his part in the bud. Her performance here is proof that vulnerability does not equate to an inability to function without a man, and Mottola's suggestion that unhappiness and doubt can be relieved by a mutually loving relationship is romantic and true on both sides of the gender gap where the romance in Twilight is one-sided and disturbing. If Stewart brought half of what she does here to that series, I'd be the first in line for the next sequel.


As I was pressured by the word limit in my initial review, I devoted little space to discussing any of the actors, and I was catastrophically off the mark with the one person I did detail (Stewart). Both Eisenberg and Stewart are just right for the roles, fitting their current image but adding refined detail to them not present in their other work. Their reserved, dry personae lend an air of credence where other films inject a manic character designed to pump out one-liners like AA fire in the Battle of Britain or to generally act like a jackass (Adventureland does have one such character in the crotch-punching Frigo, unsurprisingly the one aspect of the film I thoroughly dislike). They rub up against the more over-the-top characters played by Hader and Wiig, whose Bobby and Paulette are ludicrous entrepreneurs with dangerously indifferent views of the safety of the rides and the corndogs. Yet they are also tempered by a certain lovable quality; they blare that effing Falco song all day, yell at patrons to properly dispose of trash and attempt in vain to generate some enthusiasm in the game presenters, but none of the employees hates them. Bobby does not fire James for losing the G.A.P., and when another angry patron attempts to beat the poor lad, Bobby bursts out of his office wielding a baseball bat like a father defending his child ("You don't know what I'm capable of!" he shrieks to the suddenly terrified thug). Hader and Wiig are both adept at stealing their scene separately, and together they manage to pull off their caricatures without sacrificing the story's believability.

But even the combined might of Hader and Wiig cannot upstage the genius that is Martin Starr. I only mentioned him in passing in my original review and indeed in this one, but in the interim between seeing Adventureland for the first time and now, I watched Freaks & Geeks, so let me now speak as Martin Starr's #1 New Fan. Starr stole absolutely every moment on that show, a series filled with great performances from each of its cast, and here he effortlessly walks the line between the dry, hyperliterate sarcasm and relatability of James and the comic exaggerations of Bobby and Paulette. His Joel is a Russian lit major and sometimes nihilist who smokes a pipe, which he admits is a pretentious affectation but gives him some amount of serenity. His delivery is so deadpan that you don't get the joke until it passes you, taps on your shoulder and punches you out when you turn around. When he gives that Catholic girl a copy of his favorite Gogol book as his way of courtship, he is at once hilarious and heartbreaking in his shy awkwardness.

Adventureland stumbled at times, sprinting ahead too quickly at the end and occasionally given to dubious directorial choices that threatened to suck the life out of some shots, but of all the recent attempts to create an identifiable depiction of young adult life, none came so close to the mark as this charming, understated '80s throwback. Unlike the majority of autobiographical films, it is neither overly nostalgic nor embittered by the hindsight of age; often downbeat and measured, it nevertheless offers a touching and happy ending without sprinkling saccharin all over the place. If this doesn't claw its way into my top 10 by the end of the year, it will be pounding at the edge like a 900-lb gorrila until I finally acknowledge it to everyone.



*(I used to wonder why so many films made high school the place of security when leaving college for the real world was the bigger culture shock, only to get to college and realize that the friends I'd built up over 12 years were across the country and I had only four to make lasting impressions with any new people.)

Babel

Alejandro González Iñárritu sits at his desk, looking pensively at a screenplay he's just read. After taking a few deep breaths, he picks up the phone and calls Guillermo Arriaga. The phone barely rings once before a voice answers.

Guillermo Arriaga: Alejandro?
Alejandro González Iñárritu: Guillermo? I just finished reading your script.
GA: What did you think?
AGI: Well, that's what I'm calling about. Um -- oh Christ I don't know how to say this -- Ar--are you kidding me?
GA: Wha--what's the problem?
AGI: Are you serious? This is the exact same script you gave me six years ago.

The sound in Iñárittu's phone suddenly drops to a low hiss. He strains his ear and hears a faintly whispered, "¡coño!" Suddenly the sound of Arriaga's breathing intensifies.

GA: I don't--I don't know what you're talking about.
AGI: Really? A script about the lives of separate people all joined by an unlikely root? Doesn't ring any bells?
GA: I think you're being kind of childish about this.
AGI: I think you're trying to end me! We've already made this movie. Twice. If we do this again the townspeople are going to ignore us crying wolf.
GA: I'm telling you, these movies are different.
AGI: [hissing through the eroded barriers of patience] How?

Iñárittu absent-mindedly fingers his scarf, wondering if its stretching wool could conceivably asphyxiate someone.

GA: I keep broadening the scope. We started in the Mexican underworld, expanded to America, and now we're traveling the world.
AGI: Expanding the stories doesn't make them different!
GA: It does, though! Amores Perros was about surviving into adulthood, 21 Grams was a romance, and this is about couples becoming parents and their relationships with their children, who will then grow up and start the cycle anew. It's a logical progression of my cartography of the human condition.

This time, Iñárittu pauses. He swears he can hear the writer holding his breath.

AGI: [calming] Wel-um, fine then. That does sound interesting. Why don't we cut out one or two of these plotlines though and focus on the rest.
GA: Absolutely not! We have to do all of them!
AGI: Why?
GA: B--because the multiple stories show how the generation gap is universal and that we're always at a crossroads with our children and unsure in which direction to continue.
AGI: Yeah, but it's overly repetitive and it gets bogged down at multiple intervals to openly discuss the same message. And I don't even see the point of putting the Jones family in the story at all. The parents do absolutely nothing and the kids only serve to set up the story of the maid. Her part is nice, so you should separate her story from the Joneses and just throw them away all together.
GA: Have you gone insane?! If I take one element out the stories lose their connection.
AGI: What connection? This is the most contrived bit of nonsense I've ever seen. A rifle links 4 families from across the globe? Are you kidding me? Why not just write in a precocious Scottish child called MacGuffin while you're at it?
GA: The rifle gives the story meaning! You don't think it's interesting that the object that links the world together is a deadly weapon?
AGI: NO! You can't just throw in a symbol without any connection to the story and expect anyone to pick up on it or care. It is pretentious, freshman-year-at-film-school bullshit and I'm better than this. Let's cut back a bit and just make them vignettes, like Jim Jarmusch films.
GA: I will not change a word. The connection is solid and it's genius. We'll get Brad Pitt for the star power, throw in some nudity and ride that critical wave to Oscar gold.
AGI: You have truly lost your mind. This is barely passable and contrived and stilted and preaching. I have worked too hard and come too far to let myself make this. This is outright self-parody and none of the pros overcomes its matching con. I can't take this anymore; you and I are done professionally.

Iñárittu goes to slam the phone, but stops. He thinks for a moment, the hand holding the receiver moving closer and farther away from the base as if literally weighing his options through it. Finally, he brings the phone back to his ear.

AGI: You really think we can get Brad Pitt?

Pan's Labyrinth

[Warning -- contains spoilers]

Guillermo Del Toro has always been fascinated with Gothic fantasy, both the Victorian romance/horror and the Medieval sense of the word, the artistic moment when the profane melded into the sacred resulting in pious but often terrifying works. He grew up loving the tasteless and mania of splatter gore pictures, and yet rather than ape the free-flowing body fluids of the works of Sam Raimi or Herschell Gordon Lewis, Del Toro uses his more excessive effects in the aid of atmosphere. For though he often makes horror films, and damn good ones at that, his approach can be just as readily applied to his (relatively, as he doesn't waste money) big-budget Hollywood blockbusters.

Pan's Labyrinth is a masterpiece precisely because it reveals the director's knowledge of his strengths. He recognizes the current of atmospheric terror and imaginative horror/fantasy that runs through his work and strips away the detritus until he's left with the core of his auterial vision -- of wickedly dangerous but attractive iterations of classic fairy tale creatures, loving shots of creepy crawlies and of clocks and their innards. Upon that rock he builds his church, a vision of heaven and hell that comes less from a religious text than the minds of Lovecraft and Poe. In my review of Let the Right One In, I placed that film in a sort of unofficial triumvirate of fantastical horror stories involving children with the great Night of the Hunter and this opus, the three collectively representing the responses of pre-adolescents to terrifying circumstances. Night of the Hunter turned the stalkings of a murderous psychopath into a grim (or Grimm) fairy tale, while Let the Right One In dealt with teenage loneliness and hormonal rage with a romance both Platonic and thinly sexual.

Ofelia (Ivan Baquero), however, faces much larger problems. Set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Pan's Labyrinth foists not just personal but sociopolitical terror upon the shoulders of its 10-year-old protagonist. Thus, her emotional defense mechanisms require greater fortitude and commitment to maintain some sense of sanity. As such, the film contains an almost boundless imagination, borne from the mind of a child who carries with her old, leather-bound copies of fairy tale books that look as if they collectively weigh as much as her.

Her father, a tailor, died in the war, though we don't know where his loyalties lied nor even if he served in the military. The mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil), remarried to the fascist Captain Vidal (Sergi López) and suffers through complications from pregnancy. Vidal, an unsettling embodiment of the inherent fascism of male dominance, has his new family driven out to the Spanish countryside where he is mopping up lingering cells of Communist fighters. He risks his wife and his baby's health, but "a baby should be born where his father is." Already traumatized by the death of her father, Ofelia must contend with this terrifying man and the violence he perpetuates.

She finds a respite from these worldly concerns by following a stick insect (or fairy) to an ancient stone labyrinth near the estate Vidal has commandeered for them. Inside, she a spiral stone staircase leading deep into the ground, where she finds an antechamber filled with mysterious carvings and one very tall faun. The faun tells her that she is not borne of mankind but of the moon, the spirit of a long-lost princess of a forgotten realm and that he shall guide her back to her rightful home ere the full moon.

First, though, she must prove herself with a series of tasks. After completing each one, the faun gives her some reward to help her for the next trial. When Ofelia's mother begins hemorrhaging terribly, the faun gives the girl a mandrake root to place under Carmen's bed to heal her. Ofelia clearly views the faun as a much-needed father figure, but she's still a child and therefore can be quite insolent when she feels like it. More than once, she openly defies Vidal (the only character brave enough to do so to his face), disappoints her mother by ruining a pretty new dress in her adventures -- she enjoys going to be without supper as it spares her Vidal's presence -- and ignoring some of the faun's instructions, to horrific consequences.

Perhaps the greatest distillation of what makes a movie came from no-nonsense, versatile maestro Howard Hawks, who said, "A good movie has three great scenes, and no bad ones." Pan's Labyrinth certainly qualifies, and its three great scenes are some of the most memorable of the decade. The first involves Ofelia meeting the faun in the underground chamber. For all his size and distinctive design, the creature melded perfectly into the walls. Aided by Doug Jones' unassailable body language -- if you need to put a guy in a costume, you're not doing your film a service if you don't hire Jones -- the faun conveys wisdom and authority in his movements but also giddiness and care. Del Toro and his makeup and costume team of David Marti, Montse Ribe and Xavi Bastida craft the faun out of the elements: he seems less goat-like satyr and more wooden Ent, borne of the earth, stone and flora from which he emerges to meet Ofelia, looking all the more real because he is (Del Toro only uses CGI when what he wants cannot be physically recreated). When he says to the girl, "Do not be frightened," she isn't, nor is the audience, precisely because he's such a beautiful and striking creature.

The second is the harrowing scene of Del Toro's take on the myth of Persephone. Ofelia must travel through dimensions to the home of a dangerous creature to retrieve a ceremonial dagger. The faun warns the girl not to eat anything she finds there. Inside the portal is a terrifying vision indeed, of a humanoid monster frozen at a table, sat before a pair of eyes on a plate without sockets in his face to house them. Of course, the rest of the table is covered in mouth-watering food, and Ofelia can't help but grab a couple of grapes (you just can't find good pomegranate seeds anymore). The rest of the scene is the most nerve-wracking, suspenseful thing Del Toro has ever filmed; Gene Siskel used to complain about films putting children in danger for a cheap emotional impact, but had Del Toro placed Vidal himself in this situation, chased by a lumbering, hissing monster with eyes in its clawed hands and permanent blood stains on its mouth (also played by Jones), he would still have generated nail-biting terror.

The third great scene of the film, and I'm surprised to say this, involves a grisly torture scene. I'm not one to dictate what can and can't be shown on-screen, but the recent upswing in gratuitous torture porn has been the most revolting (and most inadvertently revealing) trend in contemporary cinema. To hear that Del Toro, a fan of splatter pictures, conducted a torture sequence should send me running for the hills then, yes? Well, no; in fact, Pan's Labyrinth is one of the only torture scenes in the movies (the haunting sequence in Godard's Le Petit Soldat being the only other example that comes to mind) of torture that Jonathan Rosenbaum calls "artistically justifiable on some level." Taking into account Rosenbaum's predilection for identifying and loudly decrying (as one should) what he perceives to be the fascism of many productions, that seemingly tepid compliment might as well be a pullquote on the DVD cover. It helps that Del Toro, whose sumptuous visuals made the rest of the film so inviting, curbs his style back to stark horror in the scene. As Vidal prepares to torture his stuttering captive, Del Toro uses only shot/reverse shot structures with cold lighting as the captain holds up various tools and describes the future of their "relationship" together. Del Toro then cuts away from the action, returning only to find the prisoner a horrific, bloody mess without forcing us to sit through the process that turned him into it. The scene ends with an act of mercy by the local doctor (who's been healing the other side the whole time) as powerfully felt as any of Ofelia's more noble actions, and I daresay that it ends a depiction of violence and tyranny on a note of beauty.

Yet while we all might (rightly) laud praise upon Del Toro's jaw-dropping visuals and his sense of flow, one must also pay attention to his script, not only the tautness of the emotional journey but of its allegorical qualities. All of Ofelia's tasks in some way connected to the real issues affecting Spain. Ofelia ventures to and old, mighty and gnarled tree to find a giant, slimy toad inside. It is bloated and greedy, the animus of Franco's fascism, which rations out food to the populace but lavishes upon its officers and honored members palaces and feasts. The Pale Man, whom Del Toro described to costume designers as "a fat man who suddenly lost all his weight, is the emaciated shell of the old Spanish monarchy, itself once fat on the blood of the peasants and capable of seeing only that which they wanted (hence the eyes in the hands) but now stripped of its privilege and authority but still a terrifying and murderous creation. Even Ofelia's baby brother is symbolic, representing the future of Spain. If the baby stays with Vidal and his ilk, Spain itself stays in the hands of the fascists. When Ofelia refuses to sacrifice him on the faun's orders, it's as much as declaration of her unwillingness to damn the country as it is a testament of familial bonds.

While she might have been upstaged by the child actors of Let the Right One In, Baquero gives one of the most memorable performances ever seen by a kid. She is somewhat bratty and overly precocious, yes, but she's also, out of all the kids we normally see, rebelling not only against adults but an entire system that most of us would condemn. She's also brave and ethical even at her worst, which is more than you can say for most characters (or real people, for that matter) at any age. Del Toro also extracts great work from his adult actors, particularly López as the sociopathic Vidal --near the end of the film he's on the receiveing end of a Glasgow smile, which makes him look uncomfortably like the Joker out of Nolan's Dark Knight -- and Maribel Verdú as Mercedes. Verdú is known for playing the sex goddess (see Y tu mamá también), but here she plays a haunted, sad housekeeper whose fury is unleashed in the end, a wrath that can rival Vidal in pure intimidation. It's one more aspect of Del Toro that might be masked in the shadow of his stunning visual acumen, and yet more proof that he's one of the finest directors working anywhere in the world today.

There are those who will ask whether Ofelia's adventures are real or imagined, as if the answer means anything or proves its quality or lack thereof. The film opens with its ending, played backwards as a dying Ofelia's blood returns to its wound; perhaps, then, the events were not only imagined but created on her deathbed, a final, hallucinatory fever dream à la Mullholland Dr. But does that make any of this less "real"? If this is some escapist reverie, why is the sound design so harsh and immediate, from the constant creaking of wood to the crunch of of Vidal tightening his leather? I do not care whether what happened was true or if Ofelia makes it all up to comfort herself and send her soul to her vision of heaven, because that's not the point. Pan's Labyrinth is a tragedy, yes, but also a vibrant examination of how a child processes and internalizes horror and a flawless vision of what that horror might look like when mixed with her innocence and imagination.

The Wind Will Carry Us

Having seen only two of his films, I'm already discovering what it means to be an Abbas Kiarostami fan. Foremost is patience, the likes of which make sitting still through 2001 seem as easy as watching a Youtube clip. The Wind Will Carry Us, largely considered his best work, does not even bother to establish a plot until it reaches the 30-minute mark, yet by that time I was sufficiently hooked anyway. Kiarostami's direction, while sparse, is not minimalistic, and the way he can capture with astonishing clarity even that which he keeps off-screen continues to fascinate me.

The film opens with a familiar image, of a car traveling on a winding dirt road in the Iranian countryside, a terrain so spare and desolate that the car's passengers shout with excitement when they pass a tree. The "engineer" -- as he's called -- Behzad comes to a village, small but labyrinthine, so complex that he enlists the aid of a precocious village kid, Farzad, to help him around the place. After ingratiating himself a bit, he at last reveals his purpose for coming to the village: he's a filmmaker documenting mourning rituals, and he's here to wait for a resident 100-year-old woman to die so that he can film the resulting funeral.

It sounds macabre, and it is, and there's a surprising amount of black comedy to be found here for those who watched his decidedly severe Taste of Cherry. The idea of hanging around a village like vultures waiting for a sick creature to finally die -- which she never finds the time to do -- is so dark I wasn't even sure at first if it was a satirical jab at the emotional vacuity of "objective" documentarians who like scientists will sit idly by as lab animals die so they can study the remains. Kiarostami inserts numerous shots of Behzad receiving phone calls on his cell but unable to get a clear reception, forcing him to run to his car and drive up to higher ground yelling "Hello? Hello?!," the antithesis of the Verizon "Can you hear me now?" commercials. At the top of the hill is a man digging a well, and the two engage in idle chitchat. The two compare the frustrations of their job: "You're lucky you have a pick axe," says Behzad to the man, jokingly considering speeding up the process.

Yet from this comedy comes reflection as profound as the sort found in his previous feature. During one of his many trips to the top of the hill for reception, Behzad witnesses the digger trapped by a cave-in and summons help to rescue him. As he rides to the hospital, the local doctor explains his philosophy, that life should be loved and enjoyed, a sharp contrast to Behzad's twisted mission. Like the suicidal protagonist of Taste of Cherry, Behzad is losing or has lost his ability to perceive and appreciate the beauty of the world. Yet unlike Badii, Behzad doesn't seem to realize it. That would explain why the compositions of Taste's shots were flattened and often dull, and why the village Behzad visits is such a tangled, unpredictable web: Badii saw no beauty in the world, while Behzad hasn't quite reached that conclusion but is still...inconvenienced by beauty, unable to see the appeal of the village for constantly losing himself trying to get to specific places.

Kiarostami's direction here, in fact, proves beyond shadow of a doubt his masterful skill with the camera, and he's also one of the more unique filmmakers I've ever seen who never dabbled in the avant-garde. When faced with typical situations -- such as filming actors speaking in a car, "fish-out-of-water" city slicker in the country tales -- he makes the choices that no one else would think to make, and thus he invigorates these shots and tropes as if he was inventing them on the spot. As he did in Taste, Kiarostami does not place a camera in the back of a car looking forward nor on the hood of the car looking inward, instead placing the camera in both the passenger and driver's seat, looking directly at its speaking characters one at a time. He also blurs the line between fiction and documentary better than any director since Herzog: as he scans his camera over an alley as chickens run madly about and people wander in and out, we wonder, "Did he, could he, have planned all of this, or did this heavily improvisatory director simply stumble upon a shot he liked?"

And while most films about a city dweller in the country feature the inevitable shots of ragged bumpkins, Kiarostami cheekily decides to not even show numerous characters -- Behzad's film crew, the old woman they're documenting, the well-digger. Is this a reflection of Behzad's solipsism? I doubt it, as that would not explain why we see the young boy or the woman who runs the tea shop. A more accurate (yet thin) explanation would posit that the figures who are heard but never seen are those in some way connected to the story, the crew and old woman for obvious reasons and the digger by virtue of being the person Behzad confides in. If this film is about Behzad's inability to recognize beauty in his work, then that lack of perception extends to those even involved with the work.

"Why," you might ask, "would filmmaking be an occupation devoid of beauty? Isn't the whole point to capture beautiful imagery?" Kiarostami seems to suggest -- perhaps manifest his fear -- that shooting images omits that which makes them beautiful. I'm reminded of the old superstition that photographs steal a part of your soul, and I wonder if the person taking the picture loses something as well. The entire film is a build-up to a funeral, but when it finally arrives, Behzad has observed so much in the village that he realizes that life is too beautiful to sit around waiting for death (unlike Badii, not his own). And so, at last reconnected to the world, he commemorates the funeral by leaving town without filming. This might be the only film where running away is the brave and noble choice, and it's only one of the reasons that The Wind Will Carry Us is one of the most interesting, unique and thoughtful films I've seen of contemporary cinema.