TIFF Review: Gravity

My other post makes my feelings more plain, as this was a quickly written mini-review, but these were my first thoughts on the disappointing Gravity. Read them at Movie Mezzanine.

Ocean's Twelve (Steven Soderbergh, 2004)

Ocean's Twelve is one of my favorite Steven Soderbergh films and the best reflexive takedown of the sequel ever made. It jovially begins as a shameless retread of Ocean's Eleven before spiraling out of control by exaggerating every aspect that made that film a success until the result is a bewildering mess and a giddy commentary on the lazy self-satisfaction of most sequels. Somehow, the in-joke-heavy, pally nature of the acting among Hollywood's A-list does not lapse into pure smugness, perhaps because as much fun as the film has in deconstructing overdone studio mechanics, it also invites the audience to have fun with the cast, provided the viewer can let go of the desire for any kind of fulfillment from the plot. Ocean's Eleven sublimated all of Soderbergh's aesthetic tics into an unexpected crowd pleaser; its first sequel let all the new fans know what they were in for.

My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.

The Descendants (Alexander Payne, 2011)

With its blocky opening narration and almost immediate diagnosis of hopelessness, Alexander Payne's The Descendants seems destined to hobble itself out of the gate, with not even its parched wit capable of saving it. Slowly, however, it emerges one of the most honest, least insistent films Hollywood has ever made on the subject of saying goodbye, with all its regrets, frustrations and revelations both welcome and unwelcome. Payne, who co-wrote the adaption of Kaui Hart Hemmings' novel with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, uses the few plot hinges merely to explore the contours of human reaction to a tragedy, making for one of the most subtle, interior movies I've ever seen get greeted with almost universal, instant praise.

The title refers to the unexpected ancestry of protagonist Matt King (George Clooney), a lawyer who resides in Oahu. King is the descendant of Hawaiian royalty, a princess who married a white missionary. And as he explains to the audience, his lineage gives him and his extended family ownership of a 25,000-acre land trust, which is set to expire in seven years. Rather than wait for the land to legally fade from their hands, his cousins want to sell the property for development, making them all extremely rich. Matt, the trustee of the land, is all on-board with this plan, until a boating accident leaves his wife in a permanent coma and changes the way he thinks about everything.

The Ides of March (George Clooney, 2011)

The Ides of March is a political drama under the mistaken belief it's a thriller. It film hinges on a Shocking Revelation telegraphed in the first five minutes, the fallout of which wishes to throw the audience for a loop but instead unfolds in tedious predictability. Its title, which connotes portentous imagery of politics at its nastiest, fails to capture the true mood of the film. There is no sense of doom hanging over George Clooney's film, only a sad resignation. A more accurate, and no less political, title would have been CNN's perennial sign off, "We'll Have to Leave It There." In an attempt to ensure wide box office appeal, Clooney's film waters down its rhetoric and potential depth of savagery behind the scenes to come to the banal, universal truth that politics corrupts people, a maxim accepted at face value and not explored to any extent.

As such, The Ides of March embodies the same neutered centrism we see in our current president. Clooney plays his presidential candidate as the Obama of 2008 but with even more broad appeal. He's got military experience, leadership experience, and all the talking points that made Obama a symbol of change. But in breaking the clay feet of this alloyed idol, Clooney tries so hard to blame the idea of politics in general, of that commonly accepted evil, that he fatally undermines any possible belief the audience could have in the idealistic innocence of its politics-savvy protagonist.

The American

If Anton Corbijn's The American has any clear directive, it is to mess with its audience. Ostensibly a thriller about a hitman/weapon maker, The American sets up every trope connected to these kinds of stories: the one last job, the killer hiding out after being compromised, a sinner's quest for peace and the battle for his soul. Then, Corbijn lets all of these stories drift away. Instead, the director returns to the existentialist territory of Melville's great Le Samourai, creating a star vehicle that dares Americans to line up for a film they will inevitably despise.

After a tranquil opening that places the protagonist, Jack (George Clooney) in an idyllic Swedish forest with a female companion, the film immediately throws a curveball when mysterious men start shooting. That Jack should encounter someone trying to kill him is of course totally unsurprising, but the measures he takes to conceal his identity are shocking and demonstrate that the James Bond type can be dangerous for lovers not simply because other people might shoot at them.

Having been discovered, Jack retreats to Italy and meets his boss, Pavel, who tells the killer to hide out in a nearby town until further notice. On the way, Jack suspects he might be driving into a trap and heads to another town in the vicinity. There we spend the next hour and a half, roaming the cobblestone streets and surrounding country roads of the gorgeous Castel del Monte. Jack poses as a photographer, a believable cover in such a pastoral village.

Practically nothing happens in The American, which is precisely the point but naturally does not console those going in hoping for some exciting ride with one of America's best A-listers. Jack befriends an old priest who speaks to our protagonist as if he knows what Jack really does for a living. Yet he never puts up a major fight for Jack's soul, and he even reveals parts of his own past that make him sound like an empathetic friend rather than a well-meaning but imperious holy man. When he tells Jack, "You must believe in a hell, because you live in it," he sounds not like a priest urging confession to ensure Jack a place in heaven but someone offering him a shoulder to cry on to make his life on this plane of existence more bearable.

Jack also spends time with a prostitute, Clara (Violante Placido), and even she manages to fall for him in a way that adheres to the endless hooker with a heart of gold stories while digging into the cliché. Clara doesn't beg Jack to take her away, and Jack only once asks her not to go to work. By skirting any open, stilted conversations about love, the two craft one of the only convincing hooker-john relationships I've seen, one that works because it's treated more or less like a normal relationship and not some sort of validation for the prostitute (or the man who initially does nothing more than pay her for sex).

Corbijn keeps everything elliptical. Jack's assignment in hiding is to make a custom rifle for another assassin, and his most technical work involves making a suppressor to dissipate the sound of gunfire, making it impossible for anyone to tell where the shooter is located. Similarly, Rowan Joffe's script and Corbijn's direction scatter the elements of the hitman thriller so you can't trace the clichés back to their sources. The American embodies the genre even as it deconstructs everything it can with a fluid grace.

The American constantly rubs against a typical plot, only to cut back to the moments in-between the action. With its constant shots of winding mountain roads and contemplative car rides, you could almost call the film "Abbas Kiarostami's The Killer." Here is a thriller where the most exciting moments are teases, where the much-delayed payoffs are intentionally stark and cold. After testing his rifle with the assassin (Thekla Reuten), Jack can pause everything to watch an endangered butterfly fly around an untouched park. Even the other killer stops to watch, and the shared moment of regret between them, not sexual tension but an understanding of the game they cannot escape, is surprisingly moving. The protagonist knows that he's being sent into hiding just so his boss knows where to find him, and when the Swedes who sent people after him track Jack down, it's unclear whether they work for some rival or simply Pavel.

People know Corbijn from his Ian Curtis biopic Control, but even that subdued film cannot compare to the beauty of his style here, an atmosphere far removed from the music videos upon which he made his initial reputation. His background as a photographer serves him better here than it did with Control, which the director made partially because he photographed Joy Division in their brief history. Consider the opening credits, the best I've seen all year (even above the frenetic animation of Enter the Void). Jack drives through a tunnel so long that it requires lighting even during the day. The dark yellow of the lights casts Clooney in contemplative silhouette, the end of his other professional-in-hiding movie, Michael Clayton, shot from a different angle. When the camera shifts to the back seat looking forward, the world outside the car is blurred in shallow focus. Jack cannot see the road ahead. At last, he sees the literal light at the end of the tunnel, but it does not seem to draw any closer, remaining seemingly the same distance away even as the dot of light grows. Finally, Jack reaches the end and the screen fades to pure white. Is the symbolism obvious? Sure, but Corbijn does not place serious weight on the moment, letting it scatter as he does everything else, preserving the beauty lest it be endlessly dissected.

The general public reacted to The American as if George Clooney had personally come to each theater and splashed acid in everyone's face. In fact, had he done so, they might have at least been excited that something happened. I, however, was mesmerized. Deconstruction these days is de rigeur, something that every hip writer does to show that he's above something as vulgar as a genre film. Corbijn, however, truly examines: he breaks apart each cliché, studies it, and gently puts it back together in a way that looks different but works the same. In the process, he makes a work of art where so many strive to be "Liked" on Facebook. Clooney has been trying for the last decade to make a serious artist out of himself, and if he hadn't succeeded before (I would argue that he has), his willingness to alienate 95 percent of his American audience surely proves he's gotten his wish. That's the quiet hilarity of the film: the Italian characters routinely mention his nationality, as does the title, yet it could never play in the country its protagonist represents.

Up in the Air

Ryan Bingham loves his job. He loves the freedom, loves the travel and loves the opportunity to discuss his worldview with the people he meets. His line of work takes him around the country, stopping in major cities to conduct employee layoffs on behalf of bosses too cowardly to do the job themselves; in each scenario, Ryan soothes the terminated employee with warm but blatantly rehearsed speeches about unfulfilled potential and the newly created opportunity to chase one's dreams. He's a perverse motivational speaker and professional end-of-life care rolled into one, a priest who gives the last rites and gently assures the dying that there is indeed a heaven. Played by George Clooney, Ryan can't help but ooze disarming charisma, and Up in the Air suggests that some of Clooney's slick screen presence might be snake oil.

Spending all of his time in airports, hotels and offices has taken a psychic toll on Ryan: he enjoys living life out of a carry-on bag (checked luggage requires you to be at the airport 35 minutes earlier, costing him a week of his life for every year on the job) and even gives motivational speeches on the virtues of freeing oneself from the burdens of possessions and relationships. Underneath his warm rapport with the people he fires is the coldness with which he deliberately isolates himself from the world.

Up in the Air, the third feature by Jason Reitman, is primarily about the challenge to Ryan's ascetic philosophy, presented in the form of two relationships, one he casually courts and the other forced upon him by his occupation. He meets Alex (Vera Farmiga), another frequent flyer who lives by a similar code of conduct as Ryan, and they engage in casual sex when they happen to cross paths during their constant shuffle across these great United States. They compare notes on the best places to grab a quick bite and the membership cards that offer the best rewards. Their attraction is immediate, but both agree not to take it further than a casual level.

The second person who suddenly enters Ryan's life is Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick, one of the few bright spots in the Twilight films); fresh out of college, Natalie proposes massive shifts in Ryan's company that would stop sending people like Ryan to businesses and instead conduct layoffs via Web chats, thus cutting out nearly all of Career Transition Counseling's travel budget and streamlining the corporation. Reitman's decision to set a film about the current job situation in the point-of-view of those doing the firing is bold enough, and Natalie's technological, hyper-efficient overhaul of CTC reveals that even those who fire the stragglers of the world's increasing automation are themselves becoming obsolete. Ryan attacks this plan and tells Natalie that she doesn't know a thing about firing people, so their boss (Jason Bateman, channeling just a bit of the jerk he played in Juno) has Natalie travel with Ryan for a while to give her some experience.

Kendrick's plucked eyebrows and icy stare provide a sharp, often humorous, contrast for Clooney's lopsided grin and his expressive eyes (seriously, forget the smile; the man's got the best eyes in the biz). Natalie makes a fool of herself in her first round of termination sessions, her rigidly formulated plan for firing people disintegrated when faced with an actual human response; is, though, Ryan's warm and consoling tone that much different? His lines are just as rehearsed as hers, but he delivers them more naturally, and his own lines are the result of years of practice with people, so what is unpredictable and terrifying for Natalie is but one of several general types of responses Ryan hears every day. In one of the funnier segments, he teaches Natalie about the benefits of carry-on bags over luggage and discards items in her suitcase that won't fit in the smaller bag and simply take up room, reminiscent of an Army pro removing unnecessary items from a rookie's gear. He derides Natalie's heartless business model, but she rightly points out that his philosophy is openly hostile to human connections, for building "a cocoon of self-banishment" around himself.

In only a short time, Reitman lets us get to know these characters: Ryan tells Natalie about his one goal in life -- collecting frequent flyer miles -- and she sits, abashed, as he explains that he could get his name put on a plane if he collects 10 million. "You guys don't grow up" she rants; "It's like you need to pee on everything." Natalie's cold, theoretical professionalism belies a barely contained emotionality; when her boyfriend dumps her via text message (ironic considering her proposal for electronic termination), she confesses to Ryan and Alex that she only moved to Omaha and got a job at CTC to be with him and that, for all her business-oriented plans, she most wants a family. Ryan, on the other hand, is instantly likeable and treats everyone like a buddy, but his private life is solipsistic and vacant. Naturally, the two become counterpoints for each other, the older professional teaching the inexperienced rookie the full impact of her job while Natalie attempts to parlay Ryan's gift in the meeting room -- such as assuaging a late-middle-age pink slip recipient (J.K. Simmons) by reminding him that he minored in French cuisine and is the sort of person who'd become trapped in desk work years ago and now had the chance to follow his dream -- into actual humanity.

Exploring the area between them is Alex. Farmiga gained exposure through The Departed, albeit in a role that offered nothing for her or any other actresses despite playing a part that condensed two roles from the Hong Kong films that inspired Scorsese's flick. Funnily enough, she essentially plays two roles here, a humanistic soul who tempts Ryan with his first serious thoughts of love and the horrific embodiment of his anti-romantic philosophy. She acts as the link between Natalie and Ryan, and it's darkly amusing to see Ryan's horror when confronted with either aspect of her character even as he falls for her. For Natalie, Alex offers a sobering portrait of what could happen if she continues to sacrifice her dreams. It's a delicate part, and Farmiga's ability to keep her character's true self ambiguous until the end places her near or at the front of the pack for this year's Best Actress race.

I managed to avoid reading a single review for Up in the Air and avoiding all the hype it was possible to ignore, a feat, given the circumstances, almost as impressive as Ryan's goal of reaching 10 million frequent flyer miles. Of course, one can't help but catch shards of opinions, and the general consensus seems to think that Reitman taps into the zeitgeist of the current economic fallout. I remain unconvinced; Reitman has been working on an adaptation of Walter Kirn's 2001 novel almost as long as its been on the shelves, and the references to the recent collapse occasionally stick out like sore thumbs. After spending most of the film explicitly mentioning the difficulty of job hunting in the current climate, one character receives a job on the basis of a letter of recommendation that is short, vague and wouldn't be accepted by a high school career adviser on behalf of a student, much less a major company looking for an executive.

Far more interesting are the lives of the three main characters, relevant to contemporary issues facing society but not defined by them. If Reitman does not convincingly parlay the interesting perspective on the financial crisis into a weighty commentary on it, he at least crafts an interesting and layered multi-character study, featuring three of the best performances of the year. Reitman succeeds best at examining the mindset of these characters and the haunting tragedy of these financial times through his direction, much improved over his somewhat lackadaisical take on Cody's script for Juno: Up in the Air moves through an isolated world, defined by dimly lit, sparsely occupied hotel lobbies, electronic ticketing booths and empty office workrooms where Ryan and Natalie sit deflated among scattered, empty chairs that likely lost their masters that day; one shot, of Ryan through his hotel room, looks as if it came right out of Let the Right One In, a film that perfectly captured feelings of loneliness and isolation. The penultimate scene, a brief montage of the fired employees -- actual non-actors who'd been recently laid-off that Reitman cast in the film -- who disprove Ryan's erstwhile outlook on life by telling the camera how the love of friends and family saw them through the stress and uncertainty of unemployment; it's a moment that recalls less the headlines making the news than the final shot of Schindler's List, where Spielberg showed us those who survived a horrible ordeal. That moment is worth more than Reitman's nearly on-the-nose dialogue about the economy combined.

Out of Sight

Out of Sight's opening sequence is one of the most delightfully witty heist scenes you'll ever see: a suave man dressed in business attire approaches the counter and charmingly tells the clerk that his partner, currently speaking to one of the managers as if opening an account, will shoot the man in the head if she makes one false move. The plan goes off without a hitch -- the robber knows not to take the bills at the bottom of the register, does his best to keep the clerk calm, and he walks out of the bank without anyone the wise. Then his getaway car doesn't start.

That's Out of Sight in a nutshell: a deftly cool comedy of errors, one whose characters have all the details in place save the most basic. Jack Foley (George Clooney) has been robbing banks since adolescence, so many he's lost count, and he views prison as more of a timeout than a punishment. Enlisting the help of two of his buddies -- well, maybe just one buddy and a mutual acquaintance -- Jack stages a break-out and ensures his success by ratting out another potential escapee to divert attention.

In his escape, he happens to meet U.S. Marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez), who is stuffed into the trunk of her own car along with Foley while his accomplice Buddy (Ving Rhames) drives them to safety. Because this is a film, Karen and Jack develop an instant attraction to each other. Because this film is based on an Elmore Leonard novel, it is somehow brilliant.

Soderbergh captures Leonard's deft characterizations, witty dialogue and involving plot with aplomb: Clooney and Lopez have such believable sexual tension that your TV will probably give off static electricity when you're done watching the film. The dynamic between them, and the question of whether Sisco pursues Foley out of love or to take him down, creates a sexual tension rarely felt in your average, manufactured rom-com, a genre that, for all of Out of Sight's crime elements and Soderbergh's inventive camera trickery, seems to be the best fit for the film.

The rest of the cast excels with the material as well; Rhames then had numerous thug/crime boss roles under his belt, but here he serves as Jack's conscience, practically begging Foley to, just once, think before he acts but unfailing in his support for his friend. Only on a second viewing did I even recognize Albert Brooks as a millionaire we meet in a flashback of one of Foley's stints of prison, using his finances to ensure his safety, particularly from Don Cheadle's Snoopy Miller, a sadistic thug who milks the terrified white-collar criminal for all he can.

Steve Zahn shows up as Glenn, the accomplice nobody wants on his team but always knows just enough to justify his position in the crew. Zahn steals most of his scenes, because he's Steve Zahn; his goofy charm provides overt comic relief in a film already bouncing with cleverness, but he brings enough paranoia and self-awareness to the stoned fool to anchor him to the story. Perhaps my pro-Zahn bias influenced my perception of the character: I adore Steve Zahn, and he makes every film he graces with his presence just that much better. Hell, I even enjoyed the National Treasure movies because Justin Bartha's character reminded me of Steve Zahn.

Soderbergh does not simply rely on these killer performances to see him through to the end, however. With editor Anne V. Coates, who also photographed Lawrence of Arabia(!), Soderbergh enacts a creative rebirth after being largely cast aside through the early '90s. Shots end in freeze-frames and softly fade into the next one. As he would do in his future films, Soderbergh plays audio from some other shot under another; is the audio a memory? A dream? If so, whose memory or dream is it? The editing adds to the mystery of the relationship, so that when Jack and Karen meet in a bar, it's anyone's guess whether the scene will end with the two shagging, in a car returning Jack to prison, or with one character jolting out of bed sweating from that crazy dream they just had. Soderbergh further displays his off-kilter and often brilliant cinematic sensibilities by casting Michael Keaton as FBI Agent Ray Nicolette, the same role he played in Jackie Brown. I don't know if this is the only time that an actor has played the same role in two unlinked films made by separate directors, but there's something so exciting about the way Soderbergh makes cinema a part of his movies.

I can't find much to criticize about Out of Sight. It's dense and it folds back on itself more than once, but that only adds to the film's intrigue. It has all the wit and cheek of the Ocean's films without their narcissism, giving each character their foibles to balance out their first-impression personalities. The cast uniformly excels, and they look like they're having fun with the material without forgetting why they're there. But for all the bouncy quality of the actors and the wit that flows freely from their mouths, Out of Sight occasionally puts forward a moment of simple, effective truth. How many other heist films would allow their protagonist the clarity to ask of their plan, "Do you know anyone who did one last big score and then gone on to live the good life?"

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.

Ocean's Eleven

The original Ocean's Eleven was the first of the Rat Pack films, a star vehicle meant to turn its stars into even bigger ones. Steven Soderbergh, indie darling that he is, found something appealing about that. Hot off the heels of his two most mainstream films to date, Erin Brokovich and Traffic, the director of sex, lies & videotape and Schizopolis went for the whole hog, creating what would become the star vehicle franchise of the decade. Whatever became of the sequels, though, Ocean's Eleven still holds up as a deliriously fun, completely self-aware heist comedy, a sleek but engaging trawl through the Las Vegas underworld, which is just as unremittingly glitzy as the surface level.

We are even led into this shimmering criminal world by a refined gentleman. Danny Ocean (George Clooney), a thief who got sloppy after his wife left him, is released from prison on parole which he wastes no time violating. Ocean travels to Los Angeles to find his old partner Rusty (Brad Pitt), now laying low and fleecing clueless celebrities of their money by teaching them poker -- nothing else in the whole movie is as funny as Topher Grace triumphantly laying down his hand and declaring "All. Reds." to the whistling awe of his equally moronic buddies. Ocean looks somewhat deflated by his time in prison, and he's simply too dapper to make you think of him as a thief, which makes it all the more surprising when he announces his intention to rob the vault containing the money of three casinos, the three casinos: the Bellagio, The Mirage and the MGM Grand.

Rusty and Danny know that the heist will be the biggest in history, and they need to lock down the best damn crew in the world. Somehow, perhaps through sheer charm, they convince nine men -- demolitions experts, confidence men, bank-rollers, electronic wizards, and one very small, very talented Chinese acrobat -- to participate in this suicidal venture. The payoff? A cool $160 million, which judging by the continuing spiral of the U.S. dollar might be enough to buy a Pepsi ten years from now. The heist is particularly dangerous because robbing these casinos means indirectly robbing their owner, Tony Benedict (Andy Garcia), a ruthless businessman who sees any attempt to cheat his casinos as a personal attack. Soon, we learn that Ocean wants to rob this man not for the massive payout but because Benedict "stole" his ex-wife, Tess (Julia Roberts, here pretty much in name only).

You may hate this film's sense of self-assured cool, but there's no denying that Soderbergh clearly understands the "Vegas movie" and he shoots Ocean's Eleven accordingly. His camera never seems to stop, mounting a blitzkrieg of Michael Mann-like technical details, witty banter, swanky five-star hotel rooms, casino backrooms filled with walls of surveillance monitors, and the mad jungle of the casino floor, a hive of desperate gamblers swarming to and fro losing their children's college funds.

It's the sort of surreal world that's stranger than fiction, befitting the over-the-top personae of the characters who seek to shake it up. Scott Caan and Casey Affleck play two Mormon man-children with intense sibling rivalry that explodes often making for great distractions in the casino but equally annoying outbursts among the crew. Bernie Mac slides headlong into the wearisome role of the Angry Black Man, but the idea that Mac's character is the one playing that card, combined with Mac's innate ability to make the most tepid and hackneyed material in the world sound as funny as a Bill Hicks rant, takes the sting out of that egregiously overused stereotype. My personal favorite of the 11 has to be Matt Damon's Linus Caldwell, a crack pickpocket who becomes the tail for whatever mark he assigned. Linus always finds himself in the middle of the minor but openly acknowledged power struggle between Danny and Rusty: like the child enduring his parents' messy divorce, Linus must field the feelings of distrust one has for the other, even as neither Danny nor Rusty gives poor Linus an ounce of important information. Damon is one of the most underrated actors working (along with his admittedly less talented buddy, Ben Affleck), and his portrayal of Linus as equal parts clueless dope and capable member of the team is the only aspect of the franchise that remains interesting through all three films.
Ocean's Eleven is meticulous, far too meticulous for such an implausible scenario; Danny and Rusty's plan for the heist makes The Joker's schemes in The Dark Knight seem about as complicated as finishing a half-solved Sudoku puzzle. Yet somehow Soderbergh makes it work, and there's actually a bit of fun in seeing the film a second time and looking out for all the barely noticeable setups for the ultimate payoff. For all its sidelining details, Ocean's Eleven maintains a constant level of fun that makes revisiting it a nice, relaxing experience rather than a tedious exercise in dramatic setup leading to an unsatisfying conclusion (that film has already been made, and it's called The Usual Suspects).

In my review of The Girlfriend Experience I mentioned how I often got bored at some stage. Even for a film as upbeat as Ocean's Eleven, that's true; this film moves as such a brisk pace that whenever it slows, even for a moment, it feels like the entire plot comes to a standstill (I believe this is called relativistic momentum, but looking at the precariousness of my current grade in Physics II I am unwilling to comment at this time). Nevertheless, Ocean's Eleven is a hip, finger-snapping salute to the city that defines American artifice. Compared to its glossy sequels, this often comes alive, especially when Soderbergh inserts brief shots of hand-held camera movement that act as adrenaline shocks just as you're thinking that the film is settling into too comfortable a groove, a groove that the sequels wore out until they cut clean through the vinyl. My biggest single complaint with the film is Julia Roberts' inability to do anything other than stand around in a few scenes; she would receive a bigger part in the next film, which sounds great on paper until you get to the matter of her playing a character who at one point poses as Julia Roberts, a failed gag that tried to go meta and nearly brought down cinema with it. But in all the places that its sequels created a noxious cloud of smug, Ocean's Eleven is bouncy and fun, and if there's something wrong with that I don't want to be right.

Burn After Reading

The Coen brothers have never been ones to take themselves seriously. The best part of the Oscars last year was seeing the uncomfortable looks on their faces as they had to collect award after award from their peers, like the kid who hides in the back of the class suddenly being asked to come to the board and do a problem. Whenever critics start to love them too much, they take a razor to the wrists of their careers, bleeding out any pretentiousness before it builds up and makes them cocky. Such is the case with “Burn After Reading,” the follow-up to possibly the best movie of the decade thus far, “No Country For Old Men.”

A subtle send-up of the spy thrillers by John le Carré, the film centers on four main characters: Linda (Frances McDormand), who wants plastic surgery so she can finally find the perfect man; her airheaded best friend Chad (Brad Pitt); Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), an alcoholic CIA agent who plans to write a scathing memoir after being forced to resign; and ex-Secret Service agent Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), who’s having an affair with Osborne’s wife (Tilda Swinton). While Cox’s wife files for divorce, Chad finds a CD full of CIA secrets at the gym in which he and Linda work. Seeing a way to pay for her elective surgeries, Linda (with Chad’s help) conspires to blackmail Cox in exchange for the disc.

From here on out it’s standard Coens’ fare: dumb people try to pull off something far beyond their limited grasp and understanding, and a lot of people die painful deaths. The brothers are clearly influenced by the work of Flannery O’Connor; “Fargo” or “Barton Fink” are grotesque morality plays just as complex, esoteric, horrifying and (often) darkly funny as O’Connor’s short stories. We don’t really get anyone to root for, save perhaps gym boss Ted (Richard Jenkins), who longs for Linda just the way she is. Everyone else is a self-absorbed monster.

What really sets this apart from their previous screwball efforts is the acting. Swinton has a look of perennial exasperation, as if the totality of everyone’s idiocy is too much to bear. Malkovich brings all his snarling venom to the forefront as the misanthropic Cox; when he spits out to one character, “You’re in league with morons,” his words are so acidic they could burn through steel.

In the latest collaboration with the brothers, Clooney does a fine job of tearing down his leading-man persona for more character-driven work. A sex-obsessed, paranoid man, Harry generally stops panicking only long enough to run a few miles and bed yet another woman. Clooney has proven several times over his ability to carry a film, but it is when he takes a back seat that he really shines.

But the real stars are McDormand and Pitt. McDormand, in her best performance since 2005’s “North Country,” is the kind of person who thinks she’s humble and down to earth but is really elitist. She acknowledges (and greatly exaggerates) her own physical flaws but expects her soulmate to be perfect. Linda’s disposition is that of McDormand’s own Marge Gunderson (“Fargo”) mixed with a bitter edge brought on by age and loneliness.

Despite a host of great performances, Brad Pitt steals the show. He hops through the film with earbuds on, raucously dancing to music only he can hear, with facial expressions that look almost childish. His role is the smallest of the principal cast, but I can guarantee it’s the one you’ll be talking about the most.

“Burn After Reading” certainly won’t keep the attention of all the converts “No Country For Old Men” brought to these stylish cult directors, but people looking for another surreal, non-linear, brilliant mess in the style of “The Big Lebowski” should be quite pleased. At one point, a CIA superior (played by J.K. Simmons, who can always turn every piece of his dialogue into a one-liner) tells his subordinate to come back to him “when it all makes sense.” He’s in the wrong movie. A friend I saw it with said it dragged. I disagree; like all of the brothers’ films, it simply takes its time. Aided by director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki (filling in for a busy Roger Deakins), the Coen brothers have offered up 2008's best-looking comedy, and one of its funniest.

Michael Clayton

It's a testament to Tony Gilroy's writing that he manages to pull Michael Clayton above the clouds despite some questionable choices he makes behind the camera. Gilroy, who got his start in Hollywood writing scripts for The Devil's Advocate and Armageddon, eventually exhibited some actual talent with the Bourne trilogy. The success of those films granted him a bit of clout in town, and he poured it into this effort, his directorial debut.

Nominally a legal thriller, Michael Clayton follows its titular hero, a "fixer" for a prestigious law firm. When clients get into serious trouble that needs to be cleaned up outside of the courtroom, they call Michael. We first meet him as he deals with a client who just got into a hit and run. Something's clearly on his mind, and he pierces through the man's self-righteous indignation with direct advice on how to proceed. After he leaves, Michael drives around the countryside before stopping to admire some horses. Then his car explodes, and we flashback 4 days.

This sort of structure could have ruined the "thriller" aspect of the film--and I maintain it certainly hurts it--but Gilroy crafts such a complex and unexpected picture that I never dwell on this early misfire. If I might slip into my pretentious apologist mode for a moment, perhaps it's Gilroy's way of informing us that the thrills are secondary to the character study he sets up. That character study ultimately sets the film apart from easy classification, and it's what makes it entertaining.

You see, Michael has a lot on his plate: he tries to connect with his son when he has custody, deals with debts incurred when an investment fell through and finds himself just generally questioning his line of work. This questioning gets compounded when he must contend with the mental breakdown of his friend Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), one of the firm's most skilled lawyers. It's his manic voice we hear at the very start of the film, and we soon learn that he's a manic-depressive who stopped taking his medication. The resultant state of mania came with a sort of twisted epiphany concerning the disgusting implications of his job. Though Michael thinks his friend is crazy--and he's not wrong--Arthur's ramblings stir his own feelings of worthlessness.

Meanwhile, a major client of the firm, U-North, also has to deal with Arthur's breakdown, as he was their representative and he went mad in a crucial deposition. Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton), U-North's general counsel, speaks with fixers of her own to deal with the problem to protect dark secrets from coming to light. She sends the story into numerous twists and turns as the scope broadens from Michael's personal drama to introduce her arc. Swinton plays Crowder as a woman on the edge of a breakdown of her own as Arthur gets closer and closer to pulling skeletons out of closets, and you might pity her if Gilroy didn't make sure we were firmly against the company (that's not a slight against him, mind you, just the way he structured it).

It's hard to talk about the movie without becoming endlessly entangled with spoilers, as a number of stories pop up and get solved that aid the overall narrative. Critics praised its originality for being a legal thriller that never set foot in a courtroom, but I think of it as a melodrama and a character study that just happens to have some thrills in it. Yet most of those thrills manage to further the character drama; they're not in there just to wake up the audience. It's some hard work to get right, but Gilroy lucked out with his incredible cast. Wilkinson and Swinton put in terrific character work, and both earned their Oscar nominations. We also get a great little role from Sydney Pollack, in one of his final roles.

But the real star is, of course, its lead. Clooney is one of the most underrated actors working today, and I think he's a master character actor. Clooney has a lot of emotional weight to shoulder, but he carries it wonderfully. Even if the film is, at its heart, a melodrama, Clooney never hams it up and even stays professional when he loses the cool near the end. The man is usually at his best when carves out some niche comic character (think his work with the Coens), but his performance here is understated and effective. I wish more people took him seriously.

Michael Clayton doesn't exactly bust down doors and wave its middle finger at established genres, but it does carve out a little niche for itself on the border of drama and thriller that makes it a different and rewarding experience. I'm not as ecstatic about the film as I used to be, but I still think it was one of the best films of a year that overflowed with quality. If for no other reason, see it for the killer performances, but you might also find yourself hooked by Gilroy's inventive and engaging script.

The Thin Red Line

In the mid-70s a director named Terrence Malick graduated from the American Film Institutes's conservatory with a master's degree, and set about making two of the finest films in the richest decade of American cinema. Badlands (which I have not yet seen) and Days of Heaven (which is one of the best films I've ever watched) established Malick as a master filmmaker, one who could capture images of endless natural beauty and mix them with meditative scripts that were uniquely his. Days of Heaven in particular defied just about any convention you'd care to name, with its passionate love triangle filtered through the eyes of a teenage girl forced to grow long before she should have. With that film, Malick was on top of the world.

Then, he disappeared. For twenty years the world wondered where this visionary filmmaker had gone and, of course, rumors circulated. "I heard he died." "No, man, he's just living on an island somewhere." Finally, in 1995, Malick began casting for a war movie. Three years later, The Thin Red Line hit theaters, and it looked as though he'd made it right after Days.

Starring an ensemble cast including Nick Nolte, Sean Penn, John Cusack and future torture porn star Jim Caviezel, The Thing Red Line documents the Battle of Guadalcanal through the eyes of a fictionalized group of soldiers, some fresh-faced, others old. Yet the age gaps don't mean as much in this film as they normally do in a war film; many of the educated officers are just as green in the field as their cannon fodder.

The film opens with Caviezel's character, Pvt. Witt, living AWOL with a Melanesian tribe. For him, the tiny village on the edge of the sea is Eden, a location Malick alludes to throughout the film. His paradise is short-lived; a patrol boat tracks him down and Sgt. Welsh (Penn) sends him to join the front line. As the company prepares to invade Guadalcanal, we meet yet more characters on the boat and learn more about the characters.

Even before the first battle, Malick crams two films into one. One film is a war story that subverts some war clichés without calling attention to itself, and the other is an existentialist search for spiritual truth. We start with a peek of Witt's heaven, and on the boat we learn of Colonel Tall's (Nick Nolte), a career-soldier who's never seen a battle. He speaks proudly of how he read Homer in the actual Greek, and cannot wait to see what a battle will actually look like after reading of them for so long. In his voice-over he mentions that this battle could be his last shot for a promotion before retirement. War is not necessarily his Eden, but he clearly looks forward to it.

The two aspects of the film create a dichotomy that most directors could never reconcile, but--and I humbly beg you forgive the cliché--Terrence Malick is not most directors. He captures the reedy hills of Guadalcanal with pristine detail, yet he breaks up the long, pastoral takes with quick cuts that leave the audience as confused as the soldiers. They land to find a deserted beach, but when they attempt to move in the center of the island a hidden machine gun nest mows down every advance. Even so, Tall orders his men on.

This all could have very easily devolved into the usual war archetypes, but Malick doesn't take the easy way out. Yes, Tall callously orders his men on a suicide run without considering the consequences, but when a field captain refuses he wonders if he might be wrong and heads to the front lines to see for himself. He realizes his error and the men change plans and take the bunker.

But just as Malick took much of the passion out of Bill's scheming in Days of Heaven, so too does he break up the visceral battles. Now, his battle scenes are chaotic, grand, and every bit as exciting as Spielberg's in Saving Private Ryan, but he spaces them out between meditations. If I had to hazard I guess, I'd say The Thin Red Line is Malick's way of saying that all creatures kill, and that Earth itself is our Eden, but we can never regain it. After the first grand battle, Witt disappears to another village but no longer finds comfort in it, for he sees the violence and evil even there. Malick inserts shots of crocodiles and a bird, injured by crossfire, dragging itself along the grass. In voice-overs, the characters search for meaning and they always lead to death.

I wouldn't call the film realistic, or at least not aspects of it. It gives us fleshed-out soldiers, but I doubt these kids were thinking about the nature of evil and death as mortars exploded around them. Personally, I'd be thinking "Don't die, don't die, duck! Don't die." But, of course, I can only speak for myself. However, Malick is a surprisingly adept action filmmaker; armed with a team of editors, he splices together rapid cuts to keep the viewer disoriented without ever going hog wild like more recent action purveyors. Combined with his more epic long takes, it makes for just about the most beautiful looking war film I've ever seen.

This is not my favorite war film. Hell, it's not even my favorite war film of 1998. However, it's maybe the most original and singular entry in the genre. The original running time clocked in at about 3 1/2 hours, but Malick recut the film down to just under 3, and it shows. He clearly aims for a more holistic approach rather than touching on each character individually, but even then some characters come off as barely cameos for special celebrity guests (Travolta and Clooney come to mind). I also would have liked to see some perspective from the side of the starving Japanese soldiers, but I cannot complain since we eventually got that film in the form of Clint Eastwood's masterpiece Letters From Iwo Jima (which plays not entirely unlike a companion piece to this film). Nevertheless, this is easily one of the finest war movies ever made, one that adds an approach entirely its own and, though that perspective creates some disconnect, makes for thought-provoking moments to compliment the carnage.