Capsule Reviews: Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie, Skyfall, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie (Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, 2012)

Anticipating the ire of their many detractors, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim build their feature-length Billion Dollar Movie on a joke that plays on them inexplicably receiving money from major corporate interests to do their thing in the mainstream. The creative duo's audacity has often eclipsed the actual content of their 11-minute episodes on Adult Swim, making the prospect of a 95-minute feature daunting. Surprise, surprise, this is amazingly focused, with something approaching a plot and everything. Because a relatively stable foundation grounds the film, Tim and Eric's usual diversions manage to pack more punch for letting the nuances of their weirdness shine through. Every technical hiccup, awkward insert shot and flat line of dialogue delivered just a second too late creates a sense of discomfort like a low-frequency sound. I cannot explain why I find that effect hilarious, but then, the sight of John C. Reilly hacking up a lung as a Dickensian, wolf-raised orphan or Ray Wise presiding over a grotesque sort of body cleanse need no justification. Grade: B-

Steven Spielberg: Munich

An act of American obliviousness sets in motion the events of Munich. At the 1972 Olympics, a group of American athletes stumble across some Palestinian men attempting to get past a gate. Used to the sight of small bands of men from different countries roaming the area, the Americans jovially call out to them and ask what event they're in. Blind to the tense, apprehensive faces of the men, the athletes show them in and depart on friendly terms. But before the Americans are even out of range, the group is already pulling out new clothes and weapons to storm the hotel room holding the Israeli Olympic team. They do, and everything else plays out on the actual newscasts recorded over the next 18 hours. It ends, of course, with Jim McKay's infamous declaration, "They're all gone."

But despite the film's title, Munich does not end with the conclusion of its heinous massacre; it's only just begun. In fact, Munich may not even be about the aftermath of the killings in the titular city. Released in proximity with the 9/11-conjuring fever dream War of the Worlds, Munich serves as the more thoughtful, severe follow-up to the notion of a terrorist attack and society's response to it. Spielberg's reenactments of news crews frantically assembling outside the hotel, scrambling for any new updates as their presence only worsens the situation, is as indicative of Spielberg's true aims as the final shot showing the New York skyline with the World Trade Center still standing in the middle of the frame. Munich may be about a specific event and the fallout from it, but the director clearly wants us to apply the lessons the movie teaches to more current issues of terrorism and counterterrorism.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher, 2011)

Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is to sexism what Kathryn Stockett's The Help is to racism. Both work less as attempts to grapple with serious topics than shallow wish-fulfillment fantasies by those unaffected by the subject matter. For Stockett, a white woman, it was the harshness of the Jim Crow era as catalogued by an author stand-in so emphatically not racist that black people not only trust her but risk their lives to secure her book deal. For Larsson, who helplessly witnessed a gang rape as a teenager, it is Sweden's startling patterns of sexual abuse as catalogued by an author stand-in so emphatically not sexist that the avenging fury of violated Woman herself not only trusts him but screws him. Furthermore, as it was written while Larsson was in hiding over his reporting, the book also addresses his longstanding issues with toothless investigative journalism and Sweden's lingering extreme-right element.

Yet David Fincher's adaptation is not really about any of those things. Tossing out Larsson's self-righteousness entirely, the film also reduces protagonist Mikael Blomkvist's almost comically active sex life—it's amusing that the novel's version of Blomkvist gets laid as much as James Bond, and he's played here by the man himself, Daniel Craig. But Fincher even hacks out the questionable feminist empowerment of Lisbeth Salander, presenting her violence with a coldness that robs her vengeance of its bloodlust. Instead, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo acts as a retroactive bridge between several of Fincher's films: it links the religion-tinged carnage of Se7en with the analytical anti-whodunit of Zodiac, as well as that film's painstakingly slow-going, interpersonal analog with The Social Network's ultra-fast, beyond-humanity digital. If Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is about the late author's preoccupations, then Fincher's is about his own.

The Adventures of Tintin (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

Written as one extended climax, The Adventures of Tintin can be a draining experience, and one generally bereft of traditionally dramatic human elements. Yet the film bursts with such exuberance and imagination that even the Uncanny Valley limitations of motion-capture animation vanish in Brobdingnagian sequences so vast they make the special effect showcases of the Indiana Jones films look like the Super-8 pictures Spielberg made as a teenager. However well or poorly Spielberg's crack team of British writers capture the spirit of Hergé comics, Tintin is remarkable first and foremost for allowing one of cinema's biggest dreamers the opportunity to do anything he wants to do.

Spielberg's camera, already so active and eager in his live-action films, is here unmoored from any hindrance, be it spatial dimensions, production safety or physics itself. Every shot swoons, tilts, zooms and soars with elegance, creating such fluid motion that scenes routinely flow into each other through sudden inversions of  scale and setting. A massive setpiece shrinks into a puddle of water stepped in as the focus shifts, or a camelback trek through an endless desert forms on the back of a hand. Such segues make the film even more vertiginous, a dizzying, unabashed exercise in style over substance, one constantly in motion as the 3D communicate the unstoppable momentum, not unlike action lines in a comic. But when the artist in question is one of the medium's great stylists, sometimes it's more rewarding to simply sit back and be wowed.

Quantum of Solace

Remember how wonderful “Casino Royale” was, how it added a liberal splash of Jason Bourne to the Bond cocktail and made something that fit in the modern era as well as holding true to the classic character? I don’t think any of us stopped and considered just how lucky they’d been to get away with it. There is perhaps no better proof of this than the latest Bond film, “Quantum of Solace.”

Picking up moments after “Casino” ended, “Quantum” explores Bond’s response to Vesper’s death and uncovers a highly connected worldwide crime syndicate known only as Quantum. Along the way he teams up with a Bolivian spy Camille (Olga Kurylenko) and takes down environmental terrorist and Quantum member Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric). Greene proves to be a big problem to the film; a lot rides on a Bond villain, but Greene strives to be a realistic villain and utterly fails to work in Bond’s world.

The villain’s dastardly scheme? Take control of Bolivia’s water supply, and sell it back to Bolivia for exorbitant prices. Huh, how does that stack up to other Bond villain plots? Destroy almost all life on Earth and rebuild with a tiny group of servants who worship the villain as king (“Moonraker”). Fire an EMP blast on London to cripple the UK and steal billions of British pounds (“Goldeneye”). Seize water and sell it to Bolivia, a country that, according to Wikipedia, has the lowest GDP per capita of any country in South America. That’s like selling food to Ethiopia; not only is it sadistic you’re not going to turn a big profit.

The script was written in part by bane-of-my-existence Paul Haggis, and it reeks of his stench. “Quantum” tries to introduce the real world to Bond’s world, which go together like oil and water. The film gives us a corrupt CIA, one who deals with Quantum for a cut of the profit, and Greene clearly represents the untrustworthiness of business executives. Again, this is Bond. Nobody goes into a Bond film for an allegorical tale or a slice of realism; they go to see a guy blow stuff up and make dark puns about it.

And who let Marc Forster direct this? Forster, the talented director of such films as “Stranger Than Fiction,” “Finding Neverland” and “The Kite Runner,” is undeniably gifted, but has no experience with action. The film genuinely looks like the producers came to Auburn, grabbed me out of my apartment, made me re-watch the Bourne films and said, “Direct the next Bond movie. And make it like Bourne.” The dizzying rapid cuts make it impossible to get any bearings in the action scenes, so they carry no weight. Yes, yes, Chris Nolan had the same problem with Batman, but he at least he threw some long shots into the Batpod sequence.

The film’s only saving grace is its actors. Daniel Craig might be able the first Bond actor to be even remotely comparable to Sean Connery’s defining portrayals, while Kurylenko acquits herself nicely. Amalric, a tremendously gifted French actor who finally got his big break last year with “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” does his best to make Greene work, but the character is too subtle, which just doesn’t fly in Bondworld. Dame Judi Dench is far and away the best M in the franchise’s history, but she’s reduced to a one-note character on the verge of a nervous breakdown when leaks spring up in British and American intelligence. Surely the leader of a bunch of spies is mentally capable of dealing with…spies?

But no matter how hard they try the actors cannot buoy such a shockingly dull film. “Quantum” is not a particularly bad film, but it adheres to the classic Hollywood mantra of sequels: “If it ain’t broke, do your damnedest to break it.” All the components that meshed so perfectly in “Casino Royale” are pushed to the extreme, and the result is a mess every bit as boring as the cartoony CGI-fests that defined Brosnan’s later Bond films. Bond is having an identity crisis: he can’t decide whether he wants to be realistic or escapist, and the film never finds its footing because of it. Some critics complained that this doesn’t feel like a Bond film. That’s the least of its worries.