25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002)

I continue to love Spike Lee's 25th Hour, one of his most shamelessly white elephant features (topped only by Miracle at St. Anna and, more positively, Malcolm X) but also one of his most affecting. Buoyed by a stellar cast, 25th Hour manages to walk its tightrope between an intimate portrayal of the crippling fear of consequence and a vaster portrait of its application to the September 11 attacks. The final, desperate fantasy alone rates among the best and most bravura work Lee has ever done.

My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.

Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson, 2012)

Incorporating many elements of Wes Anderson's previous films, Moonrise Kingdom might be seen, even approvingly, as the director going through the motions. It has the childhood focus of Rushmore, the dollhouse intricacy of The Royal Tenenbaums, the paradoxical criminal innocence of Bottle Rocket, the outdoor adventurousness of The Darjeeling Limited, even the documentarian angle of The Life Aquatic. To be sure, Anderson's latest instantly betrays its maker, the camera tracking and panning through an ornate, rigidly compartmentalized island home and its aloof, eerily formal child inhabitants. Set on the fictional New England island of New Penzance, this house and its surrounding locale suggest one of the director's most arch removes from the world around him, a self-contained universe of stunted genius and vague but overwhelming regret.

But these same shots also display a rough quality not even evident in the director's first film. Shot on 16mm, Moonrise Kingdom's thick grain serves two main purposes. First, it aesthetically matches the film's retro 1965 setting, casting Anderson's usual world of bright, sunny yellows in dimmer, fossilizing amber and making the buildings, which look like a model village from a contemporary train set built 1:1 scale, seem lived in and worn. Second, it adds a primal, visceral edge wholly foreign to Anderson's canon, a reflection of the emotional immediacy he attains with the movie's tale of young love in open opposition to the calcified bitterness that defines so many of Anderson's frustrated, self-imprisoning characters.

Kingdom of Heaven (Ridley Scott, 2005)

I've been meaning to write a defense of the director's cut of Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven (one of my favorite movies of the Aughts), for some time now, so I knew what to choose for my latest Criminally Underrated piece for Spectrum Culture. The theatrical cut is an admittedly mediocre movie, stressing Gladiator-esque action in an attempt to cash in on Lord of the Rings. The director's cut, however, belongs with films like Munich and Gangs of New York as some of the finest American filmmaking to seriously address the War on Terror and the modern context of endless infighting, wrongheaded wars and relativist righteousness, typically through the prism of the past. All three films (even Gangs, which concerns the American Civil War, not ages-old Middle Eastern conflicts) suggest a cyclical movement of violence from outside forces that creates seemingly endless fighting that eventually tears apart people from the inside. Kingdom of Heaven takes (even) more liberties with history than the other two, but its fundamental position, that peace, however tenuous and short-lived, is preferable to senseless war, is delivered with a nuance I've sadly come not to expect from Scott.

My full piece is up at Spectrum Culture.

Leaves of Grass

A stuttering mash-up of drama and stoner comedy, Tim Blake Nelson's Leaves of Grass plays as a cross between the podunk classicism of O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the spiritual vacuum-cum-autobiography of Midwestern Jewry of A Serious Man. Bill Kincaid (Edward Norton), philosophy professor at Brown and, soon, Harvard, teaches his students about the illusion of control and centered balance in life just before his own life proves his point. Identical twin Brady lures his brother back to their redneck home in Oklahoma by faking his death, only to trap the poor educator in a hare-brained scheme to get out of trouble with a major pot dealer in the Tulsa region (Richard Dreyfuss, who continues to look as if he's pissed off even to keep getting work).

Coenesque in conception but not execution, Leaves of Grass attempts to build a twisted comedy of errors as well as a philosophical treatise on issues of God, free will and fate, but it cannot reconcile its stiff gear shifts between moods and the fatal gaps in momentum that derail it constantly. Where A Serious Man built a thriller-like sense of dread from its comic severity and mounting sense of spiritual despair, Leaves of Grass attempts to do the same in reverse, saddling a conventional narrative with so much extra weight that the bridge collapses. Norton shines as the two brothers, giving a performance reminiscent of Nicolas Cage's in Adaptation, in that even when the brothers groom themselves to look alike for Brady's plan, you can instantly tell which brother is which without Norton uttering a word. A strong supporting cast buoys him, from the always-transfixing Keri Russell as the poetry-lovin' catfish wrangler who steal Bill's heart to Steve Earle as a half-joking rival dealer sour for being edged out by Brady's superior product (though less ambitious than his professorial brother, Brady supposedly has the higher IQ and used it to grow hyper-quality weed via hydroponics).

Nelson here falls back on his theatrical training, never making anything particularly cinematic. With the exception of scenes in cars, everything in the film looks as if it could have been a set design, even outdoor shots. A subplot involving a skittish, broken orthodontist (Josh Pais) works neither as comedy nor dramatic thread, and a lovesick coed who hounds an uncomfortable Bill with poems in Latin and threatens his potential promotion to Harvard might have worked as a tendril of the man's mounting pressures had all of the young woman's scenes not played out in tedious predictability. Of course she starts undressing in Bill's office, and if you think that door isn't going to be opened at the worst time, then you made an odd choice for what is clearly the first film you have ever seen. Only rarely does anyone not project past the nonexistent proscenium, such as a tender, believable moment when Bill drunkenly hits on Russell's Janet in that awkward manner that suggests he's not only rusty at picking up chicks but is interested in more than sex.

Nelson appears to have a chip on his shoulder about growing up in Tulsa and looking like a redneck while trying to prove himself as a learned literature freak and Shakespearean thespian -- a frustration with which I can empathize. That makes Whitman his ideal conduit, the poet's original cover for his own Leaves of Grass displaying merely his rugged portrait that belied the beauty within, but Nelson gets caught up in the plot over the mood. A shaggy dog jokes only works if you can control the audience's interest, setting up the joke for so long that the crowd loses interest only to climb back on board when the monologue continues and people commit to hearing the end of it. Nelson doesn't have the Coens' ability to string along an audience, and the punchline is less a dark, anti-climatic punch than a mere caesura that, like the end of a verse in Walt Whitman's rule-breaking poetry, indicates that the proceedings are over simply because the characters stop speaking.

Still, it's got a goofy charm at times. For all its flaws, stop-starts and misjudged laughs, Leaves of Grass certainly doesn't make me think of a host of other films to compare it to, save for the Coen brothers, and they're not bad role models when it comes to anti-comedy. Nelson was supposedly the only person to have actually read Homer's The Odyssey during the production of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and he strives for a greater respect of the arts in his vision of that fine line that separates suburbia from rural backwoods in states with few cities. Besides, how many stoner movies are structured as treatises on Socratic dialogue?

Fight Club

My decision this year to revisit some of the more notable films of 1989 had obvious personal connections ('89 being the year of my birth), but had I decided instead to pick another anniversary I could have chosen one of two particularly bountiful years for cinema. The first, 1939, is often heralded as the greatest year for the movies, period (as a side note, the highly talented and perceptive Tim Brayton over at Antagony & Ecstasy has being doing just that all year); the second, 1999, sent the 20th century out in style. I even considered running a '99 retrospective concurrently, though I suppose it's for the better than I decided against it as I cannot even regularly update the ones I have now -- I swear I'll be getting back to '89 and to John Carpenter's oeuvre soon. Furthermore, most of the finest films of 1999 are still fresh in my mind, save for some of the foreign films I still need to see, and while I certainly enjoy revisiting films from, well, it would be absurd for a 20-year-old to say "from my youth" but you understand, none of the films I've seen and enjoyed from 1999 offer any sort of challenge for me at the moment.

A lone exception is that controversial, hotly debated wrecking ball of a film: Fight Club. Upon its release, Fight Club found itself in the center of a frenzy, surrounded by fans who took to its pitch-black comedy and the finest example yet of David Fincher's relevancy and innovation in contemporary cinema as well as detractors who called it fascist, misogynistic and childish, and those were some of the kinder pans. Now, it's an indelible part of our pop culture, its twist ending beloved by those who worship such things -- as I scanned over some old reviews of the film's theatrical and subsequent DVD release I was surprised, and distressed, to see its name mentioned alongside The Sixth Sense on numerous occasions -- and that line, that line, so endlessly quoted and parodied that its mere utterance should, in reality, warrant a genuine beating. But what is it that makes Fight Club so simultaneously alluring and abhorrent? Are its fans mongoloid Hitler youths reveling in the fascist orgy that shall be our undoing, or are the haters simply projecting this image because they themselves cannot or will not read into the film any deeper than its surface level?

Upon revisiting the film, I know on which side of the fence I stand: Fight Club, sensory overload that it is, is one of the finest and most complex satires of the '90s. Of all the films concerning the alienation of Generation X, none so perfectly captures its existential listlessness. Told from the fractured perspective of its unnamed Narrator (whom we shall call Jack, after his twisted synecdochical statements such as "I am Jack raging bile duct"), Fight Club builds a mood of post-Reagan miasma around its protagonist, a suffocating poison cloud of Ellisian soulless consumerism.

Jack (Edward Norton) works for an automobile company ("A major one," he darkly tells someone after regaling her with horror stories), traveling across the country to assess catastrophic design failures and decide whether to order a recall for that particular model. Jack suffers from insomnia and, trapped in the bleary stage between awake and asleep, he absent-mindedly fills his condo with all the latest furniture and accessories from IKEA. So obsessed is he with the Scandinavian DIY-retailer that he pores over catalog entries like centerfolds.

The sick embodiment of Gen X, Jack is so desperate for something to latch onto, something that will allow him to drop the artifice of his corporate-crafted identity, that he finds himself gravitated to support groups for the disease-stricken. At a meeting for testicular cancer, Jack at last lets go, weeping into the enlarged bosom of a man who had both testicles removed. He becomes addicted to the sense of belonging, and the acceptance allows him to sleep at night. Until Marla shows up, that is. Another "tourist," she is a beautiful but morbid creature, as warped in her own way as Jack. Her presence destroys Jack's narcissistic and vampiric need to feed off these people, so they divide the various meetings as if haggling custody rights. Nevertheless, the damage is done, and Jack needs to find another way to cope with his hang-ups, and he finds it in Tyler Durden.


Tyler, the irrepressible id to Jack's neurotic superego, is free of society's consumer-based values system: he works a number of odd-jobs around town simply to wreak minor havoc, from splicing in frames of pornography into children's films to peeing in the soup he cooks at a restaurant. He lives in a dilapidated house that he casually allows to fall even further into disrepair; a Fincherian nightmare of the place, the walls do not leak so much as pour, and the running water looks a lovely shade of brown. In Tyler Jack finds an idol, someone who's broken free of the system that tortures him and has crafted an independent lifestyle ungoverned by the norms of society. The two create Fight Club, a place for other disaffected men to vent their frustrations with the emptiness of the world around them. Once a week they come and beat the stuffing out of each other, and on Monday they go back to their jobs as file clerks and waiters.

The very conceit of Fight Club is one of the most deeply satiric creations ever to grace contemporary literature/cinema: these men, so shiftless in their lives, are the dead-eyed wanderers of America's spiritual post-apocalypse. That the people who are so deadened by anomie that they beat each other to feel alive are yuppies only makes it funnier. The accusations of misogyny here seem meaningless, as Fight Club represents the bizarre need of some men, and men specifically, to experience pain to feel alive. That inherent need explains why the number of attendees appears to have compounded each time Fincher takes us back to a fight, and soon the yuppies prop up Durden as a hero, spurred on by his anti-materialistic screed: "You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis."

Under Tyler's tutelage, Fight Club morphs into Project Mayhem, directing that drive for self-harm outward into a mixture of masochistic fascism and social revolution. It starts with general vandalism: Tyler and Jack take bats to the sleek new VW Beetle -- the symbol of '60s youth repackaged by the sell-out baby boomers to foist upon the new youth both as the ultimate corruption of their values and their lingering, narcissistic infatuation with those abandoned values -- and the makeshift army loots a Blockbuster (prominently displaying a poster of Independence Day, no less, a cheeky reflection of the freedom these men feel).

But it soon escalates into threatening police commissioners and, ultimately, planning some mysterious bomb plot that might be what would have happened if Timothy McVeigh had led Jim Jones' cult: no other scene in the film is as funny and hopelessly pitch-black as the one where a squad comes back after a "mission" carrying with them a dead Bob (the large-breasted man from the testicular cancer group). A stunned Jack cannot believe what Tyler's escalation has led to, and he tries desperately to break the men of their insane conditioning. Tyler, like the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket, destroyed these men to rebuild them into a tool of destruction, and they no longer have names when they meet. So, when Jack screams that Bob was real, that his name was Robert Paulsen, these fascist idiots accept this as Jack, (co-?)founder of FC, elevating the dead to a position of honor, that in death they truly become worthy. Anyone who dismisses the film as the ramblings of fascist teenage morons -- as did Kenneth Turan -- must simply have left the theater before this scene, because it makes explicitly, hilariously clear Jack's horrified realization and disdain of the end sum of Fight Club.

Project Mayhem eventually becomes the ultimate attack on the society these men just cannot accept. Consider the brilliant extended metaphor of the soap that Tyler sells: the soap is made from liposuctioned fat, taken from people who got fat through consumerist gluttony then paid to have it removed because of society's perception of beauty. Tyler then sells it back to the people who, in a way, made it. Finally, the soap is used to make the bombs to bring down credit card headquarters, a symbol of the consumerist world that emasculates them. It is utterly insane, yet perversely ingenious.


Palahniuk's depiction of these men, perfectly refined for the screen by Fincher and writer Jim Uhls, works precisely because the satire of the men of Fight Club/Project Mayhem favors neither the anarchic revenge fantasy nor the sadomasochism of a bizarre subset of men that truly drives it. Fincher finds a perfect balance between the two, one that only fully reveals its brilliance on a second viewing because it's, dare I even say it, subtle. The yuppies fight to free themselves, if only for a few minutes of bloody pain, from their vacuous lives, yet they prove just as slavish in service to Tyler Durden as they do the corporations they so virulently hate. More so, even, because Fight Club offers them a psychosexual outlet: remember that Bob, who lost his testicles to cancer, takes to Fight Club with vigor. Through pummeling other men, he and the others find a solace that takes the place of sex.

Which brings us to the funniest aspect of the film's humor: the rampant, unyielding homoeroticism. Palahniuk, now openly gay, has long been the subject of debate for the perceived "macho" quality of his writing, but here all of the posturing and sweaty fisticuffs only feed an atmosphere of nascent homosexuality. Of course, now we all know the truth of Jack and Tyler Durden's relationship, but Fincher misdirects from it for most of the film by suggesting a borderline homosexual relationship between them: Jack sits in the bathroom while Tyler bathes, he appears to be as mad at Marla for sleeping with Tyler as he is with Tyler for sleeping with her. The first flashback places Jack in the support group, where men hug each and other and cry because they're no longer sexually active, and the members of Fight Club often clasp hands and embrace after a slugging match. Of course, the reveal of Tyler Durden as nothing more than Jack's id turns that particular relationship into an off-kilter demonstration of pure narcissism, a lingering shade of the consumer vampires that populated Bret Easton Ellis' work, but even in the end, as Jack looks forward to a relationship with Marla, Fincher has one last bit of fun by splicing in a few frames' worth of a shot of a man's penis, both a nod to Tyler's "editing skills" and a final reminder that what you just finished watching was gayer than gay pornography.


This week marked the ten-year anniversary of the film's release, marked by the release of a gorgeous Blu-Ray that brings out Fincher's jaw-dropping visual craft more than ever, and it's interesting to note how opinion has changed over the years. Roger Ebert initially questioned the clarity of the film's message and gave it two stars, but he has mentioned in passing how going through the film shot-for-shot at Boulder College with a room full of intelligent film buffs turned him around on the picture. In the current IMDb ranking of its 250 highest-rated films (not, of course, a concrete source of a film's quality but an interesting gauge of the "average Joe's" opinion), Fight Club comes in at an impressive #18. I cannot help but feel, however, that the overall shift of opinion in the film's favor is not necessarily positive, as I'm quite certain that a sizable portion of the people who voted Fight Club up the charts of IMDb merely think that it is cool and has a wicked ending -- by point of reference, The Usual Suspects, a film that lives and dies on its twist reveal, comes in at #21. In 2003, the magazine Men's Journal so thoroughly missed the point that it placed the film on a list of "The 50 Best Guy Movies Ever Made," and one of the features on the Blu-Ray consists of Mel Gibson bestowing the Guy Movie Hall of Fame honor to Fight Club at Spike TV’s 2009 Guys Choice Awards. It would seem that Fight Club has been fully assimilated into the materialist pop culture it so mercilessly mocks, "The first rule of Fight Club" being the "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" of the modern era in terms of joke-killing ubiquity.

I do not, however, believe that the perennial inability of some people to get this movie constitutes a failure on the filmmakers' part not to slam on the brakes to make its message (even more) inescapably clear. Fight Club is many things: a frenetic slice of pop-Nietzsche. An attack on consumerism and evil corporations, but specifically on the IKEAs, Apples, and Starbucks of the world, the companies that insidiously posit themselves as "one of us" and use youth's hipness against itself. A homoerotic revenge fantasy carried out by emotionally stunted morons who pin their problems, consciously or subconsciously, on their mothers and make a play at macho posturing to prove their manliness in a metrosexual world that frightens them. At its heart, however, Fight Club is a romantic comedy. Like all the other Generation X rom-coms, it's about a nerdy, neurotic loser who nervously tries to get with a beautiful, often slightly quirky, woman. Hell, the whole reason Tyler exists is because Jack envisions him as a reaction of his sexual terror over meeting and confronting Marla. Fight Club: Woody Allen meets MMA. That's why the ending is so happy: it's romance!

The Incredible Hulk

2008 will certainly go down as the year of the superhero movie. There was a string of surprisingly great romantic comedies ("Forgetting Sarah Marshall," "Zack & Miri Make a Porno," and, in my eyes, "Wall•E"), but this is the year that comic book films finally gained legitimacy. "Iron Man" launched the commercial comeback (he never stopped doing movies) of über-actor Robert Downey, Jr. and offered up a sleek superhero you couldn't help but love, the "The Dark Knight" came 'round and decimated everything in its path. Complete with superb performances not only from Ledger but most of the ensemble cast, it set a new standard for the genre by focusing on how a hero affects the world around him, and how those reactions filter back to him.

Even "Hellboy II" was a masterstroke; it just had the rotten luck of coming out a week before TDK. Yet that film overflowed with humor and visual splendor (if not necessarily plot), and I love it more and more each time I see it. But there was another superhero movie that came out last year that slipped through the cracks somewhat. It lacked the buzz and, frankly, the quality of the other films, but it still made a decent amount of bank. I’m talking about a little film with a big green hero: “The Incredible Hulk.”

The last Hulk movie was a total disaster. There are those who try to convince me that Ang Lee (maybe the most overrated director working today) created a complex Hulk, one that focused more on Bruce Banner’s psyche than on mindless action. I know what Lee was trying to do but, from the bottom of my heart, I don’t care. I don’t give a good goddamn if the complete lack of lighting symbolized the darkness of Bruce’s repressed memories, or if the poodles represented- well, horrible writing. It was dull, pretentious, and didn’t even tackle the psychological aspects of Hulk properly. I know Bruce Banner is a deeper character than anyone gives him credit for, but couldn’t he just hit something every now and then? After a few years, Ed Norton and Louis Leterrier came in to try to clean up the mess with a reboot. Did it work?

Yes and no. “The Incredible Hulk” is a pure action romp. For just about the totality of its near two-hour running length, Banner will be on the run from the military, pausing only to transform and punch a few of them. Eventually, the army will do something stupid, and Banner will have to save the day because it’s right, yadda yadda yadda. The point is, Norton Hulk smashes all over the place in fine fashion.

How can I tell this won’t try to mine the same psychological issues as the last film? The totality of the plot is presented in the opening credits montage. Apparently what Universal took away from the venom lobbed at “Hulk” was plot of any kind was bad and people just want to see punching. Judging from some of the more fanboyish reviews I’ve seen, they might not have been totally wrong. Actually, what little plot there is seems to be lifted almost entirely from the old “Hulk:” General Thunderbolt Ross knows Banner is radioactive, and considers him U.S. Army property and tracks him down. Meanwhile, Banner is in love with Ross’ daughter, which just pisses the old man off. Really, the biggest difference in these three characters is that the Banner of this film accidentally radiated himself rather than live in a house too close to a weapons testing site as a child. I like this version better.

Ross tracks Banner down in South America, and sends his top lackey Emil Blonsky (a Russian-born man who is now British, I guess because Tim Roth didn’t care enough to try to be American) and a team of commandos to subdue Banner, who promptly gets angry, and you know what happens next. Blonsky becomes Banner’s nemesis; the thrashing he takes at Hulk’s hands leaves him wanting a rematch. He gets one, and this time the Hulk actually hits him, to devastating effect. Oh, it’s on now. As the broken Blonsky lies in a hospital bed, he agrees to a dose of Super Soldier serum to fix his wounds so he can fight get the piss beaten out of him once more.

But wait! Emil knows that even with the (faulty) serum, he cannot win. So what does he do? Blast himself with radiation in the hopes that he too will be a giant beast thing because, as we all know, the best way to fight fire is by dousing yourself with gasoline. Despite the fact that Banner’s survival is billed as a miracle, the exact same thing happens to Blonsky, only thanks to the serum he is stuck in the mutated body.

So it all comes down to a showdown between freaks. Ross picks the lesser of two evils, and Banner agrees to help because…well, I don’t know why, but he must have a reason. Maybe he just wanted to be near Betty, which is kind of sweet but also stupid. This is all nitpicking, of course, because the final fight is suitably bad-ass. We all know who’s going to win, but it was a pure piece of blockbuster action in comparison to the more serious fare (even in the explosions) of “Iron Man” and TDK.

So how does the film fare in the end? I certainly didn’t dislike it, but the total rebellion against plot greatly hurts the film. What attachment am I supposed to have to these characters? Even though I know of their importance and decades-long history, within the context of this film franchise I couldn’t care less who lived or died because we never truly delve into them. The superb cast has so little to do that I’d rate the performances of the actors in Lee’s “Hulk” over them, because at least they did something.

The details of production are somewhat infamous; Norton and Leterrier wanted a much deeper movie, but the people with the money cut it to make pure action fare. The DVD comes with a slew of deleted scenes (though I suspect there are more), and they addressed almost every plot hole or rushed look in the movie. In a year of unprecedented creative control for comic book movies, “The Incredible Hulk” reminds us just how little the people with the money know and how much they’re capable of screwing up. This new “Hulk” is not a bad film by any means, but it’s instantly forgettable. Somewhere between the mindlessness of this fun ride and the dense psychological drama of the previous iteration lies the true Hulk film. I do not know if they’ll make a sequel, but if Universal gives Norton and Leterrier some freedom, they might have a big hit on their hands.