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.

The Darjeeling Limited (& Hotel Chevalier)

In his video essay for the film, critic Matt Zoller Seitz calls The Darjeeling Limited "Wes Anderson's 2001." It is an apt description: like Kubrick's space odyssey, Anderson's spiritual journey not only displays but summarizes all his themes, styles and motifs. Furthermore, much of Anderson's movie visually recollects Kubrick's magnum opus, particularly in its use of wide-lens framing of confined areas, epic composition that makes characters small and meaningless within the sets than contain them. However, that space is a double-edged sword, as the lens is so wide that it captures the edges of the sets: in pulling back to minimize the power of the individual, the camera also sets down the dimensions of the rooms and corridors. These areas are big enough to dwarf a person, yet because we can see their ends, we know they cannot support free-roaming human life.


All of Anderson's films operate in this mode, of course, but this is the first one to think of the world outside luxurious but lived-in hotel rooms and train cabins. The compartmentalized, ultra-detailed set design that makes all of his films resemble immaculate dollhouses is suddenly thrown against the real world. What's more, it's a world opposite to his Western, privileged settings. The Darjeeling Limited, and its short-film prologue, Hotel Chevalier, represent Anderson's first attempt to take his theatrical and literary characters off the stage and page and into something grander. Unsurprisingly, where previous films owed stylistic ties to theatre (Rushmore) and literature (The Royal Tenenbaums), The Darjeeling Limited must directly invoke the cinema, and not in the "movie about movies" manner of The Life Aquatic.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Made only a decade after he first garnered attention for his Britcom, Spaced, Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs. the World could serve as a bookend to his brief but infinitely rewarding career to this point. Spaced was about the VCR Generation, late-Gen-X slackers who communicated solely through pop culture references to cult movies and genre T.V. shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Scott Pilgrim, adapted from Bryan Lee O'Malley's comic series, plays like Spaced jumped forward a generation, charting millennials whose basis of shared knowledge is video games, animé and the Alpha and Omega of the Internet.

The key difference between Wright's breakthrough series and this film, of course, is that in the interim between them, he create two of the funniest, wildest and most visually astute genre films of the last 25 years. Shaun of the Dead turned a minuscule budget into a zombie spoof that worked perfectly as a zombie film, and therefore it also worked as a piercing social critique. The same slackers who wandered around dead-eyed in Spaced were now equated with zombies, forcing the protagonist to beat down creatures whom he somewhat resembled. Hot Fuzz, of course, was about a hero cop foisted onto a calm hamlet where the police force was made up of slackers of all ages, as if the refuse of each generation somehow trickled down their separate paths into the same delta.

With these films, Wright stands with Quentin Tarantino as the most daring and insightful genre movie director around, and both work so well because of layers not easily gleaned from their wild rides. As I argued in my defense of Tarantino's masterpiece, Inglourious Basterds, the director is a surprising moralist in the vein of Sam Peckinpah, capable of reveling in everything he's subtly warning us against. If Peckinpah warned us against fascism by becoming fascist himself in Straw Dogs, Tarantino left glimpses of meditation in the middle of the animé lunacy of Kill Bill, and he celebrated his Jewish revenge fantasy even as he condemned the good guys for becoming terrorists to fight terror. His fans are routinely as blind to this as his detractors, hence the proliferation of movies that simply glorify violence entirely.

Wright, on the other hand, eschews moralism for a sense of empathy. Beneath the wild mash-ups of Spaced is an interest in character that develops a cast of oddballs to the point that their quirks no longer seem an added flight of fancy to give the material a hook but genuine, identifiably human traits grounded in feelings of loneliness and doubt. Shaun of the Dead may have suggested that only something as destructive as a supernatural holocaust could snap youth out of their self-consumed reverie, but it nevertheless advanced its characters, touching upon responsibilities in relationships both Platonic and romantic. Hot Fuzz played up the latent homosexuality rampant in buddy cop films, but Wright developed the story until the two leads felt more convincingly like friends and partners than in nearly any "legitimate" buddy film.

Now, without Simon Pegg helping as his writing partner, Wright tackles material that almost seems as if it were written to be filmed by him. Scott Pilgrim follows a world so similar yet so completely removed from '90s geekdom that even the older siblings of teenagers may feel culture shock. Where the layabouts of yore connected through all those geek movies and TV shows, now the linking element is YouTube and video games. People form clans on World of Warcraft, discuss battle plans for Modern Warfare 2 as if actually going into a fight and communicate through written snippets sent instantly on Twitter, Facebook, Skype and other programs. Everything is flashy, pixellated and brief, and the kids who grow up this way are attention deficit and emotionally transient, capable of moving from fad to fad so quickly that even the fading pop culture items of the '70s and '80s seem permanent hallmarks in comparison.

Within minutes, one can see that Wright understood all of this. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World has a kaleidoscopic, kinetic mise-en-scène to shame the previous example of mainstream sensory overload, the Wachowski brothers' Speed Racer. A mash-up of video games, action movies, frenzied electropop, comic book drawings that blend American styles with manga and everything else that occurs to Wright, the film borders on the avant-garde in its visualization of the modern worldview. You cannot focus not because you're dumber than your parents but because you have access to all the world's information simultaneously. The Internet's capacity for storage and real-time access may well be the equivalent to hearing God's voice, an endless void of knowledge and power suddenly forced into a gray, mushy bundle of synapses and nerves that cannot handle the strain. Much of the comedy of the film and the comic series comes from Scott's perennial inability to retain anything, but that's not because he's an idiot but because his hard drive simply crashed.

The first thing you should know about Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is that it is funny. Damn funny. As Gene Siskel once raved about Kingpin, every time it wants you laugh, it will make you do so. Visual gags litter the screen, from hipster-flecked title cards to sidebars indicating characters' ages, coolness ratings and fun facts. This is a film where the protagonist goes to the bathroom, and his bladder capacity is shown via a "Pee Bar" that drains as the young man urinates. We even see his thoughts visualized as a roulette wheel that spins through a series of excuses to give to his girlfriend and what appears to be a voltmeter that jumps from "No Clue" to "Gets It" when something finally sinks into Scott's thick skull.

When we meet Scott, he's a 22-year-old nobody who plays bass in a band he cheerfully admits is terrible, showing up for gigs that may or may not pay and not bothering to support himself with anything so ridiculous as a "job." His bandmates -- ex-girlfriend Kim Pine (Alison Pill, so frosty that the constant snowfall in the film's Toronto setting may be her mental projection), bandleader/only person with any emotional attachment to the group whatsoever Stephen Stills (Mark Webber) and hanger-on Young Neil (Johnny Simmons), whom no one can consistently recognize despite the band's practice room being his apartment -- are just as shiftless. When Scott brags at the beginning of his new girlfriend, a pure-as-the-driven-snow Chinese-Canadian named Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), only Kim has much to say, and all of it about how she's only 17 (and a Catholic schoolgirl, no less).

His short-lived quasi-romance ends, however, when he sees a strange, roller-skating woman in his dreams with hot pink hair, a seemingly innocuous occurrence until Scott begins to spot her in real-life. Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is too cool for Scott -- so is Knives, frankly, but Ramona has the added points of being hip and from America -- but he manages to win her over and enters into a new-new relationship that seems great. Until a strange Indian man crashes a band gig and challenges Scott to a fight for Ramona's hand, that is.


In cramming the six graphic novels of the comic series into just under two hours, Wright devotes most of the film to these battles with the League of Evil Exes, seven specters from Ramona's past who make normal ordeals with dealing with partner's exes seem trivial in comparison. Because so much of the movie involves various fights, Scott Pilgrim can feel repetitive, or at least it could have if Wright hadn't been in charge. Understanding the need to keep things fresh, Wright brings something different to each fight: one plays as a sort of dance-off, another a competition between bassists, yet another as a fight with an action star (Chris Evans) who forces Scott to fight all of his stunt doubles. Each fight has its own moves, unique color palettes and a host of contextual jokes that don't let the humor flag for a second.

From a writing standpoint, the percentage of one-liners that land with precision accuracy in this film is stunning. Rare is the film that can make a decently filled theater laugh incessantly, but the barrage of Scott's vacuous incredulity, Kim's venomous put-downs, Ramona's bemused observations and the contributions of everyone else ensure that every scene, even the more serious ones, get at least one good chuckle. Characters rarely speak for longer than a sentence or two, reflecting a generation raised to express themselves in 140 characters or less, and poor Knives' face even turns into a shocked emoticon when her musical heroine (and Scott's conniving ex-girlfriend) comes to town.

Everything about the film, in fact, plays off of the idea of a generation prescribed ADHD medication en masse. Film courses could and should use Scott Pilgrim to demonstrate match cuts, as the opening arc of the film jumps time and place as conversations continue seamlessly, noting how little Scott ever seems to remember and how often you just seem to end up where you were going without processing the journey there. Reality breaks apart more often (and with more oneiric an atmosphere) than in Inception, with Scott slipping in and out of dreams, walking through eerily pitch-black, snow-covered Toronto streets and surrounding by flying streaks of onomatopoeic letters whisking about for telephone rings, landed punches and the rarely changing D chord he pounds out of his Rickenbacker. Wright's usual trickery slips into the film, such as his penchant for using his quickest edits for the most banal moments, ridiculing the action movie conceit of the superhero suiting up by quickly showing Scott zipping up and slipping on armbands and then arduously drawing out the boy tying his shoe until it becomes the funniest bit in the film. In one instance, Scott returns to the apartment he shares with his roommate Wallace (Kieran Culkin, playing Middle America's worst nightmare as a gay man who can instantly seduce heterosexuals with his charm), and Wright plays a sitcom laugh track over it, recalling its usage in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, previously the most daring and experimental mainstream feature on the market. Incidentally, experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage purportedly loved Stone's deliberately overcooked satire, and the influence of Brakhage creeps in here too, with an opening credits played over jarring and jittering displays of pure color and a devil-may-care attitude toward traditional film grammar.

Beneath the rambunctious battle sequences and the endless one-liners, however, is that same empathy that powers Wright's previous efforts. While not as prominent as in Shaun of the Dead or Spaced, the heart of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is as vital to the film's memorability as its gleeful destruction of whatever boundaries still existed for action films. The entire arc of the film concerns Scott's growth from a listless twentysomething who cannot process anything other than his own desires into someone finally reading to accept maturity. Ramona, too, has an uncertainty about life she needs to figure out, and while Scott has a right to be indignant when she sums up their relationship by saying, "You're what I need right now," he doesn't understand that she's just as confused as he is. As I approach the end of my collegiate years, I understand these feelings: you think college will prepare you for life, then you leave and realize that, even if you excelled, you spent 4-6 years with routine breaks between classes, nap times, endless trips to coffee houses, partying. I'll go into the job market less prepared for a full 9-5 occupation than I would have been after high school with its rigid scheduling. These young men and women reached some imaginary border and were told, "Now you're adults!" and then cast into the void, and they don't know what to make of it. If their journey looks flashier than ours, it's no less daunting.

Nary a hair is out of place in the film. Michael Cera's presence has been a sticking point for many I've spoken to, citing Cera burnout, but he works in charm in a way he hasn't before: Scott Pilgrim is once entirely innocent and incredible corrupt, so attention-deficit that he cannot really remember how many people he's actually hurt -- in a way, he recalls the amnesiac Leonard from Memento. Winstead finds a similar balance, never apologizing for her life but not remotely proud of it either, and the fact that she's more clearheaded than Scott only makes her sadder and more filled with regret. The supporting cast are uniformly excellent, from Culkin's incessant witticisms to Pill's bitter musings to Aubrey Plaza's foul-mouthed Julie ("Has Issues," as a bit of text helpfully explains) and Anna Kendrick's lovable bitchiness as Scott's Sister. Jason Schwartzman, Chris Evans, Brandon Routh and more make for film villains, all with enough personal and physical differences to prevent the lineup of Evil Exes from feeling samey; Schwartzman in particular hasn't been this hilariously smug since perhaps Rushmore. Wong deserves to break into some other work, effortlessly conveying Knives' naïveté and overall sweetness and playing off young actors with years more experience without once flagging.

Remarkably, they all understand what the story is really about as much as Wright does. Only just in their own adulthood, the actors realize that we all spend our youths trying to find our identity through movies or the Internet, objects that are paradoxically shared experiences even though we process them alone (and I loved the moment where a character says something witty and Scott asks, "What's that from?" expecting a movie title, only for the other to spit, "My brain!"). Then, we enter into relationships, but they're not yet serious because we're feeling our way around new territory. Only when we finally expand our perspectives to wonder how the other people in our lives see us do we ever figure ourselves out. This is a revelation more thoroughly covered in the comics, but the beauty of Wright's film is how deftly he manages to fit the core of this theme into a movie that could easily have been two hours of flashy nothingness. Instead, he mixes the avant-garde with the tangible, crafting his most frenzied genre mash-up yet but never losing sight of the heart that gives it meaning, and even the seriousness adds to the exhilaration of one of the most purely enjoyable films in years.

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.

Funny People

I may at last have seen an Apatow Productions film that could benefit from the inevitable extended cut on DVD. Strange, considering that, of the three films he's written and directed and the seemingly dozens of others he's co-written or produced over the last five years, this one suffers the most from his bloated running times. Funny People, however, needs a longer cut, or at least a version that substitutes new scenes for old, bloated ones.

Ideally, a re-cut of the film would drastically alter its third act, which is really a fourth act and possibly a fifth. All two (or three) of these final acts are resolved in the last five minutes of the film, and therein lies the problem. Funny People is Apatow's most personal project yet, and an objective hand needed to step in to revise the structure.

Oh well, if he insists on making a two-and-a-half hour dramedy, Apatow certainly knows how to stuff it to the rafters. George Simmons (Adam Sandler) learns that he suffers from a rare, life-threatening blood disease at the start of the film, and that he only has an 8 percent chance of survival. An hour later, however, he recovers. That leaves 3/5 of a film to handle the dissipated tension.

This structure is the film's strength and weakness, because it opens a bold, real type of movie that seeks to relay its message naturally, without plot contrivances or a need to get plot out of the way first. On the other hand, a film about a person coming to terms with a near-death experience and bettering himself as a result should address that experience, something Funny People constantly sidesteps.

Filling the gaps in the first hour (and the rest of the film) is a small group of struggling actors and comedians who share an apartment in L.A. Ira Wright (Seth Rogen) works a deli counter by day, but his real passion is stand-up. Noticeably rough around the edges, Ira nevertheless manages to slightly impress George, who came to the comedy club to vent some of his fears and frustrations on stage. George hires Ira to write jokes and, eventually, to serve as a full-time assistant, much to the jealousy and awe of Ira's flatmates Leo (Jonah Hill), another amateur comic clearly destined for the big leagues, and Mark (Jason Schwarztman), a moderately talented actor who scored the lead on an insufferably painful sitcom about a teacher connecting with inner-city youth.

Rogen and Sandler carry the film, and they both produce some of their finest work. It's a shame, that some people profess an exasperation with Rogen, as he's finally nailed down a style that allows him to utilize his impressive gift for improvisation while remaining on-topic. His Ira is wonderfully and hopelessly awkward on-stage, and he provides the film a beating heart to replace George's calloused, blackened one in the reflective moments. Sandler channels that darkness he brought to the fore in Punch-Drunk Love; still funny but searching for life's meaning, George at last realizes his solitude after a lifetime of losing himself to the false love of Hollywood, and Sandler beautifully captures the pain of a man who has everything but the only woman he ever loved.

That woman is played by Apatow's wife, Leslie Mann, who must shoulder the burden of much of the film's drama. When George shows signs of recovery, he attempts to reconnect with her Laura, and Mann brings serious weight to a character who must reconcile her lingering feelings for George, her anguish and resentment concerning her husband (played by an alternately loopy and intimidating Eric Bana in an interesting role clearly, tragically cut down in post-production) as well as her fears of divorce. She doesn't fully factor into the story until the last hour, which is a vital mistake because she lifts it out of the mire of its bloated middle section. Mann stole the show in Knocked Up, and she nearly does so here, though Schwartzman reigns triumphant with his irascible, pompous jerk.

Funny People is unlike anything Judd Apatow has ever made or produced, indeed unlike any comedy-drama that I can think of at the moment. The near-death epiphany is a well-trod road, but filtering it through the bleak no man's land of stand-up comedy gives it an edge. Most people tend to think of stand-up as some glorious job that lands you fame, wealth and nookie, but in reality most spend their whole lives struggling to even pay the rent (when they're even home, that is). Incidentally, when I was a kid, my friends used to encourage me to become a comedian when I grew up, not realizing that A) half of the jokes I told from the ages of 5-15 I'd cribbed from films and television and B) they were essentially trying to condemn me to a life of poverty and crippling cynicism. Notice how George, who broke out of the stand-up circuit and into Hollywood megastardom 20 years ago, returns to the stage as much out of fatalism and resignation as a desire to recapture a moment of youth.

That's what makes the massive flaws of the film all the more glaring: it has so much going for it. For all its dark comedy and interesting characters, it spends far too much time repeating segments to pad the length. Only two Yo Teach! clips should have stayed in the final cut, and the first act needed to leave a good 15 minutes on the cutting room floor. In the final, shortest act, Apatow bombards us with both Ira and George's relationship woes, an argument between Ira and his friends and conflict between George and Laura's husband (which in turn leads to conflict between George and Ira), and then he seeks to resolve all of these threads in a disjointed semi-montage. It undoes much of what makes Funny People great, and it results in a film that manages to connect enough to warrant a ticket purchase but severely disappoints in the end. Its most damning aspect, though, is that, for a film about bettering oneself, George never really changes until the final moments. What, then, was the point of sitting through those repetitive two-and-a-half hours?

Spun

Spun is just about the unlikeliest movie you'd expect to be saved by its actors, but it's easier to understand why when you look at the list of names attached. To aid writer-director Jonas Åkerlund in his foray into the altered states of drug usage, he amassed a hell of a cast, all of whom play their parts with admirable subtlety and understatement, which seems strange when you view the film as a whole.

Where Trainspotting and Requiem For A Dream dealt mainly with heroin, Spun attempts to capture the world of the meth addict, the poor white trash who don't have the money for a "luxury" like smack and settle for cheaper highs. Ross (Jason Schwartzman) stands in the center of this kinetic story; he buys his stuff from Spider Mike (John Leguizamo), who always argues with his girlfriend Cookie (Mena Suvari). Ross meets another addict, Niki (Brittany Murphy), the girlfriend of "The Cook" (Mickey Rourke), who runs the meth lab that supplies Spider Mike. This small group of acquaintances moves fast enough to capture all the actions of an Altmanesque ensemble cast, and they do so with aplomb.

Over the course of a day, Ross goes all over town, intersecting with the characters as they slip in and out of manic states and even crazier situations. He picks up a stripper in order to perform naughty activities, then leaves her bound and gagged on his bed when Cook calls up asking for rides. The only reason I can think for why he does this is that he's so zonked out that it must make sense to him, as there's nothing overly nefarious to his actions. Meanwhile, in one of the movie's funnier moments, cops raid the home of user Frisbee and his mother, believing them to be the ones with the meth lab. What makes it so funny is that a Cops-style camera crew comes in with them...as the mother is watching their program.

Ross' trips with The Cook are particularly illuminating, if for no other reason than they allow Mickey Rourke to pave the way for his '00s comeback. The Cook is a supporting character, but he walks away with the entire film. Spun seeks to capture the despair in the lives of all this poor white trash, and The Cook is the only one out of all of them who truly understands the pain that they all seek to forget, and manages to balance the dark comedy of the film (his rant on the virtues of pornography gets the biggest laughs of the whole thing) with flashes of masked pain.

My main problem with the film, though, is that the director shifts so much attention off the actors and onto the myriad of edits and trickery of the camera. Not so much building off of the kinetic styles of Requiem for a Dream and Trainspotting as stealing them outright, Åkerlund retreads over a great deal of cinematic innovation and turns it into a black comedy, albeit not half as dark as Danny Boyle's classic. Supposedly the film set a Guinness World record for the most number of edits in a film (over 5,000); I don't know if that record stands, but either way the sheer number of repetitive tricks gets old fast and the director is just lucky he scored a cast that could keep things moving.

The thing about drug movies, even the comedies, is that they tend to have a viewpoint. Stoner movies place marijuana on a pedestal, while Boyle and Darren Aronofsky used graphic imagery and inventive techniques to thrust us into the nightmare of the average user. Then there's Spun, who stands in the middle, unsure in which direction to move. It certainly doesn't endorse drugs like all the pot movies, but it also plays the comedy too lightly to really warn people off meth. The worst that happens to these kids is that they look strung out and have bad teeth. We don't see real consequences until the end, and that is too sensationalized to leave an impact. I still recommend the film on the basis of its acting (especially Schwartzman and Rourke), but don't expect a very intelligent document of a very real problem in America.

Rushmore

There's an undeniable joy to Rushmore, which seems even stranger when you consider what a bleak portrait it ultimately paints. This is a standard theme of Wes Anderson's work of course, but his other films do not give off such a false sense of hope. Anderson also deals with wunderkinds who never seem to live up to their potential, and Max Fischer is ground zero for such characters. Yet for all the film's innate charm, Rushmore never manages to bring its many conflicting ideals together into a satisfying whole, and remains more a passably fun rainy day film than the classic some make it out to be.

Jason Schwartzman plays Max, a 15-year old in his final year at the prestigious Rushmore Academy. Fischer is either a member or the founder of every extracurricular activity on campus, but his grades are slipping. I assume this is a new development, since we know his age and, last time I checked, 15 is not quite the normal age of graduation, meaning he skipped a few grades. Eventually his grades slide so much that his headmaster (played by Brian Cox) tells him that he'll fail unless something changes.

Soon afterwards, Max sits in the school chapel to listen to a guest speaker, Herman Blume (Bill Murray), and becomes inspired by Blume's frank advice. Then, he meets the new first grade teacher, Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams), and develops an immediate crush. Cross recently lost her husband, and Max brings up the subject of his deceased mother. "I guess we both have dead people in our families."

This simple line says more about the character than just about the rest of the film. Max, clearly a gifted child, suddenly starts flunking all of his classes and slyly inquires about staying on for "a postgraduate year" of high school. When Blume remarks that Max seems to "have it all figured out," Max replies with a smile, "I think you just gotta find something you love to do, and then do it for the rest of your life." For Max, he says, it's Rushmore. But it's really his childhood. Max sees Ms. Cross as an object of desire, yes, but he simply wants a woman in his life.

Of course, Cross can see that Max is obsessed, and even if she didn't, he makes it painfully clear in an amusing dinner scene, and lets him down. Meanwhile, Blume tries to mediate between the two, but ultimately falls for Cross and the two begin an affair. Blume naturally falls for Cross because he's a essentially the future version of Max, while Cross falls for Blume because she actually has a lot in common with the lad, and Blume represents a more age-appropriate version of Max.

Here's where the film loses focus. Anderson, always so whimsical, crafts an absolutely nonsensical subplot involving this love triangle, in which Max's young friend Dirk actually stops Blume's car to chastise the old man for betraying his friend (Max), Max destroys Blume's marriage in vengeance, and Blume runs over Max's bike in reprisal. In a movie that wasn't making such a serious point about an unwillingness or even an incapacity to grow up this might have been a gay romp; here, however, it seems as out of place as the original ending to Dr. Strangelove.

Anderson and writing partner Owen Wilson introduce a number of side-stories and styles, but the chief tone of the film is a regressive one. Max moves predominantly to the left in the film, signalling a desire to avoid the future; he wants to go back to a time when his mom was alive and things seemed right. Even when Max isn't moving, he tends to rest to the left of the frame. He constantly attempts to assert a sense of dominance, yet always places himself in the subordinate position. Blume, who slightly resents Max because he sees so much of himself in the boy and it only magnifies his regret, also moves regressively, perhaps in a futile attempt to go back to his childhood and change things. For him, the younger Cross brings him closer to that goal. Meanwhile, Cross clearly (and understandably) continues to mourn her husband, yet she barely moves at all. She's at a crossroads in life, unable to move backwards because she knows the pain that such movements really bring, yet she cannot move forward out of guilt.

At some point, Anderson must bring all the disparate elements together, and frankly he can't. After the conflict between the characters reaches a head, everyone finally can move forward in their lives, yet for some reason Anderson leaves us with a hint of ambiguity regarding Max's relationship with Rosemary. Some of the more absurd moments are simply left by the wayside, though I don't know how Anderson could have tied them in. The final scene at the wrap party demonstrates Anderson's skill, but it nevertheless feels hollow.

I read Ebert's review long ago, where he rightly pointed out that the Max Fischer we get will grow up to be Benjamin Braddock, the protagonist of the dated comedy The Graduate, but Anderson and Wilson could have easily turned him into a future Charles Foster Kane. That's why the film never really rises above its various scenes to make a great film; it so clearly should be a more serious affair, but loses itself in farce. Nevertheless, it is funny enough to warrant repeat viewings, and I'd rank it the second finest of the director's work after The Royal Tenenbaums, but Rushmore remains more a dizzying collection of occasionally fun and occasionally deep scenes designed to show off Anderson's obvious love of the nouvelle vague rather than tell a story.


[side note- As much as I criticize the film for not taking its material more seriously, the Criterion extra of Max's company performing Armageddon is maybe the funniest two minute clip ever.]