The Fisher King (Terry Gilliam, 1991)

Made in 1991, The Fisher King is both somewhat dated and remarkably ahead of its time, a rarity among the classical mythological/folk-tale fantasies of its maker, Terry Gilliam. That aspect of Gilliam's filmmaking is certainly on display, of course: the film gets its title from the Arthurian legend of the keeper of the Holy Grail. But its view of healing wounds and redemptive human arcs is far more deeply felt than anything else in the director's corpus, and it set the stage for a number of reductive movies that used some facet of its subtly sociopolitical construction without understanding the true humanity that powered it.

The film's first shot places a mouth in extreme close-up as it sleazily talks into a microphone in a smoky radio studio. Jack (Jeff Bridges), a shock jock who combines Rush Limbaugh's combativeness with Howard Stern's puerile humor. For the entire first scene, Gilliam never places Bridges' face in full view, alternating between overhead long shots of the jock mocking disembodied voices and more close-ups of an almost toad-like mouth smacking and oozing literal and metaphorical spittle at those poor saps foolish enough to call in and argue with the man. Even in person, Jack is a voice, a lecturing superego as vile as the most uninhibited id, spewing bile upon the populace he so completely loathes.

Fearless (1993)

[After checking sporadically for more than a year for some legal version of this film to watch (and even the illegal versions were of such poor quality as to be avoided), I'm happy to say that Fearless is now available for DVD and streaming through Netflix.]

In medium-long shots of a cornfield framing stalks in the middle plane that obscure the background, a disheveled man appears, shrouded by smoke, holding the hand of a young boy and cradling a baby with his free hand. As the man walks through the field, others appear behind him as if dropping fully formed from the stalks, milling about in bewilderment until the camera tracks with them to reveal the wreckage of a downed plane. The man does not bat an eye, and we learn through his blunt dialogue that the kids he's holding are not his own. He hands them off to responsible parties, takes one last look around, heads over to a cabbie and asks to be driven to a motel.

Peter Weir's Fearless has one of the most carefully modulated, deliberately vexing, utterly transfixing openings of any English-language Hollywood film to be mercilessly and inexplicably relegated to the realm of the unknown (and less than 20 years after it premiered). The man Weir follows is Max Klein (Jeff Bridges), an architect heading to a business meeting across the country with his partner. One almost gets the impression that the camera does not follow Max in a premeditated path but stopped upon him as it gazed over the scene and could not tear itself away. Bridges' face is unreadable as he hands the guardian-less child to authorities and returns the baby to its mother (without even stopping to say anything once he hands over the child). There's a strange, unsettling creepiness to the look of near-contentment on his face, the look one expects to see when someone wakes up from a damn good sleep.

Weir, working with a script by Rafael Yglesias (adapting his own novel), does not get into what is up with Max, instead moving through mysterious scenes that cut away before something approaching an explanation might arise. A director known more for his consistency of quality than anything, Weir achieves a poetry here he has not shown in his other features: Max rents a car to drive across country to get back to San Francisco, yet not because he seems afraid to fly again. On a long stretch of dusty road, he stops, sits outside his car and spits on the ground. The camera frame the spit in the sand, and Max's finger reaches down and rubs the saliva into the dirt and rubbing the mud between his thumb and forefinger. It is a mesmerizing moment, one that only deepens the confusion: "Who is this man? What is going on inside that head?" And just as quickly as the moment happened, Weir quickly cuts to Max driving down the road as he leans his head out the window in bliss.

Over time, we learn that Max's survival has wrenched him from his sense of self. Like an Etch-a-Sketch, he's been shaken and erased by the force of impact. He's been so transformed by the near-death experience that when he stops to meet an old friend for lunch in a diner, he munches without incident on strawberries despite his pal's reservations about his food allergy. When airline representatives offer to give Max a train ticket home, aware not only of the trauma a person would experience from flying again so soon and the intense fear of flying his wife says he had before the fateful flight, he cheerfully replies that he'd like to fly. First class, if you please.


Not much about Fearless makes sense. It's plot moves in fits; in fact, the weakest moments of the film directly concern the imposition of a narrative -- Tom Hulce's ambulance-chasing sleazeball of a lawyer drags down the movie with his frequent appearances, all of them revolving around ensuring bigger payouts in the corporate settlements. No, the film works as an appropriately scrambled, contradictory, inexplicable meditation on death, survival, grief and coping. That scene with Max and his friend in the diner exists as pure exposition, establishing pieces of Max's background and the matter of his supposed strawberry allergy, yet Bridges and Debra Monk overcome it with unspoken humanity that emanates from them and break the dialogue from its strict boundaries.

Bridges does this the entire film. An actor so at home in any role that some have accused him of doing the same thing over and over despite the vast range of his work, Bridges uses Max Klein to demonstrate just how unique he has been before and since by combining the disparate elements of his work into a single role. He mixes the intensity of his early work, the rakish allure of his double-take face (which looks so unconventional that you turn back for a second look and find that he is gorgeous), the Zen-like calm of his later work starting most famously with the Dude, the sinister streak of his rare but effective villainous roles, even the alien remove of Starman. Only Bridges could have so many elements (and more) in his bag of tricks, and only Bridges could somehow throw them all together and still make it look so goddamn effortless.

Shaken into fearlessness by the crash, Max tests his invulnerability, walking across a bustling street after being lured by a blinding, glorious light and laughing in the face of God for emerging unscathed. "You can't kill me!" he screams, not in anger but jubilation. "You want to kill me but you can't!" But his behavior takes on not so much a suicidal recklessness as a super-sanity, entering a plane of existence above that of mankind. A look of eerie calm often passes over Bridges' face, whether in the flashbacks of his moment of epiphany during the crash or in his detached dealings with humanity afterward. I was reminded of that horrifying look of drug-induced contentment that ended Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America, De Niro's haunting smile communicating practically everything but happiness.


Bridges, though immediately completely human, speaks as if projecting beyond those with whom he interacts: when taken to meet another survivor, he launches into a monologue about seeing his father die as a young man. In context, it's nearly as unimportant as Alison's airing of grievances to Max back when he ate with her at the diner, but Bridges spins the yarn like a man who says things as they come to him, unconcerned with interaction and how a perceived normal conversation should go. Wherever Max goes, he walks with head forward, as if the heightened connection of his senses with the world compel his body to follow along.

That remove interferes with Max's family life, and soon his calm gives way to an unbearable arrogance. Not only has Max been thrust into a new viewpoint, he knows it and hangs his advanced knowledge over his family's head. His wife, Laura (Isabella Rossellini), and son Jonah (Spencer Vrooman) try to understand what Max is going through, but he callously tells his wife that she can never share in what he is feeling. Later, he throws away his son's video game console because it gives him the false feeling of death and rebirth. Max got a do-over, but he actually experienced death; Jonah will get nothing from his game. When Max's attention wanders to that survivor he visited earlier, his attraction to her is not the arc of a tangled romance but something far more complicated.

As great as Bridges' performance is, and it is almost certainly the finest in a long and distinguished career, one at least expected some level of excellence from our greatest living actor. But Rosie Perez's performance as Carla, the survivor who blames herself for her baby's death, is so wholly unexpected, so out of left field, that the considerable emotional weight of her performance is exacerbated by the sheer surprise of it. If Max exists at one extreme of the reaction to a traumatic event, that of liberated euphoria, Carla lies at the other: for months, she does not even leave her bed, hoping that if she just stays inside long enough she'll die. When Max comes around and informs her that she can't die because they're already dead, she resists him but starts to open up. If Bridges pours his innate, effortless humanity into a man outside it, Perez has never felt more like a person on-screen. Just as Max has his noble traits and his loathsome qualities, Carla has the contradictions and frustrating aspects that make her well-rounded, and Perez commands the role.

Nothing summarizes the power of her performance than a scene near the end when she finally comes clean to Max about how and why she feels guilty for living when her child died, and her confessional takes on a religious property when the outpouring of grief, self-loathing and shame culminates in a frenzied repetition of Hail Marys so intense and heartrending that Jeff Bridges, an actor who at all times inhabits his characters, breaks for an infinitesimal moment, the look of panic on Max's face morphing into awe, a legend recognizing the skill of someone who, even if just for a scene, completely showed him up.

The bond between Max and Carla cannot be easily explained because it ardently refuses to fit into neat definition. An affair nearly arises between them, but even when Max speaks of his overwhelming love for Carla and steals a kiss, there is never the hint of romantic love. They merely share the bond Max cruelly tells his wife he cannot have with her, that of people who have "passed through death" and come out the other side. Roger Ebert wrote that Carla and Laura are not rivals for Max's "heart, but for his soul," but I do not even think they are rivals in that regard. Carla does not realize what effect she has on Max, aware only that his presence helps her, especially when he resorts to an improvised form of extreme therapy to prove her lack of culpability in her son's death. But Max also relies on her to maintain his isolation from his old life, and until Carla can live without Max's safety net, he cannot live without hers.


If Fearless can be unwieldy, that is at least partially because it has so much going on. I cannot hope to even write down all that I noticed on a first watch, much less all the details that can only come with repeat viewings. Weir long ago sold me on his capacity for big cinema with his work on Gallipoli and Master and Commander, and that bird's eye view of the plane wreckage at the beginning and his masterful handling of the flashbacks on the plane display that aspect of his talent handily. But it's the minor stuff here, the extraneous shots and even scenes that paint a more complete portrait of humanity. As Max wades through the crash site, a shot of a wine bottle cuts to a horrifying look at the charred and decapitated corpse of Max's partner, an unspoken lament at the randomness of it all that can leave meaningless trinkets unscathed and human beings so awfully mangled. Weir uses the business partner's widow (Deidre O'Connell) to muddy the moral high ground Max takes with his refusal to pursue the settlement case any more than he has to, and her brief appearances not only help justifying Hulce's intruding performance but complicate stereotypical reactions to a tragedy. Yes, she's trying to make money off the event, but not for the same callous, greedy reasoning as Carla's husband (Benicio del Toro). One look in her eyes and not even Max can judge her any longer.

I'm not even going to bother soft-pedaling the film's flaws by saying "It's not a perfect movie, but..." Of course it isn't: it's a movie. And what's more, it's a movie about an emotional journey, one in which the narrative takes absurd leaps in order to better visualize the philosophical and emotional power of the movie. The work of Hieronymus Bosch features at one point, and the final, more subjective flashback clearly incorporates elements of Bosch's Ascent into the Empyrean. Bosch, like Flannery O'Connor, has always represented, to me, the good and bad of personal faith: he painted visions of the diving beauty of grace, but also of the twisted tortures awaiting those found unworthy. Fearless has the same ambition of scope, highlighting the man's selflessness and selfishness in equal order. Anchored by career-best performances by its two principal players, one of whom has enough to make seven careers and the other who completely matched her co-star, Fearless could perhaps use some trimming but makes magic even of the most technically unnecessary scenes. No film this good, featuring actors this well-known, should have found its way so quickly to obscurity, but when its overdue reevaluation comes around, Fearless will look less like a unique blockbuster but a large-scale philosophical poem that could be tied more readily to The Limey and L'Intrus than other airplane disaster movies.

Tron: Legacy

The modest but devoted fanbase for Tron alleges the 1982 film was ahead of its time, referring to its extensive and pioneering use of computer-generated imagery. Unfortunately, one could not say that its sequel, Tron: Legacy, is even of its time. Caught between presenting an updated version of Tron's computer world that better reflects the compounded evolution of digital technology or simply wallowing in the dated vision of futuristic cyberspace interaction offered by the original, director Joseph Kosinski opts for the latter and cements the insular pointlessness of the whole exercise. The Lawnmower Man has more to say about the possibilities of cyberspace.

Tron: Legacy opens with swooping, animated crane shot that plunges the film into the Uncanny Silicon Valley, where an artificially young Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges, who spends half the film creepily animated) talks about his creation with 11-year-old son Sam (Garrett Hedlund in the boy's adult years). Flynn promises to take Sam with him to the Grid the next day, but he never comes home after leaving that night in 1989. Twenty years later, Sam abandons his father's company, profiting as the principal shareholder but spending most of his time slyly undermining the profit-driven number-crunchers who took over for the more idealistic Flynn. When Kevin's old partner (Bruce Boxleitner) gets a page -- yes, a page -- from Flynn's old office in his abandoned arcade, Sam heads there in the faint hope that his father might finally have returned from wherever he went. He discovers a hidden room with a strange device attached to a computer, and, well, you know the rest.

Inside the grid, so little has changed that one might assume Kosinski feels the biggest advancement in design over the last 30 years has been rounded corners. Where light cycles once traveled in straight lines, now they curve, and that's about it. Tron: Legacy might as well have been a reboot than a sequel, doing nothing more than updating the famed graphics of the original. (That is the double-edged sword of special effects pioneering: great stories live on forever, but effects are always being outdone. George Lucas has alienated nearly his entire fanbase by grappling with that problem.)

Kosinski's vision hedges closely to Steven Lisberger's, using neon chiaroscuro of plunging blacks offset by bright, pale blues and throbbing oranges set against a pixellated world. The souped-up visuals sure do look incandescent, including a few moments here and there that make good use of that most unnecessary of gimmicks, 3-D (though I can think of no better story to be told in 3-D than that of a film that likewise concerns stagnation and horizontal, not vertical, development of technology). Without resorting to a barrage of quick cuts, Kosinski manages to craft sequences of pulsating frenzy, as the colors bleed and swirl until downed programs dissolve and shatter into pixels. But it gets old so damn fast, a repetitious blend of blue and orange that dips into a sad nadir with a fight in a club that dovetails into absurd, cringeworthy cutaways to Michael Sheen hamming it up as a Bowie-esque club owner who contorts his face and body into odd configurations as if the director included only the shots of Sheen horsing around on-set. (The cutaways are a problem in general, such as a strange close-up on Sam's dog early on and a few awkwardly inserted fluff scenes that break the flow for no reason.)

If the original Tron suffered from a lack of narrative momentum, its successor is overloaded with a surfeit of plot. Discontent to simply give the audience what it wants -- mindless, sparkling action -- Kosinski and his writers, Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis, insist on forcing some kind of emotional connection by taking the most outlandish, shameless approach possible to wring a mass reaction without a personal bedrock.* Flynn never returned from his visit to the Grid 20 years previously because the program he created to fashion the perfect digital world, Clu (Bridges with the digitally young face), naturally turned on its maker, and it also set about destroying a new type of program spontaneously created by the system. "It was genocide," solemnly sighs the aged Kevin when he fills his son in on the gaps. Every fiber of my being wanted to shout, "No it goddamn wasn't." Aware that Clu could use his identity disc to break into the real world -- don't even ask -- Flynn hid out for 20 years with the last remaining isomorphic program, Quorra (Olivia Wilde), attaining a Zen-like calm that offsets the severity of the Holocaust allegory with a Dude-esque performance. "Biodigital jazz, man," Kevin unhelpfully says when describing the isomorphic algorithms, his vague, hippie speech tragically serving as the logical foundation of the film's plot.

Meanwhile, Bridges' performance as Clu may be the first time I have completely failed to buy the greatest living American actor in a role. Part of this can be explained by that damn uncanny valley he has to carry on his face the entire time like a digital albatross, forcing all attention away from one of the best faces in the biz onto the horrid, plastic stiffness of the cheek muscles (this crime is particularly egregious, as few smile like Jeff Bridges; see the ones he gives with his proper features as Flynn for proof). But he is also forced to act essentially as a Hitler substitute, obsessed with purification and perfection under his rule. Bridges has been a capable and believable villain before, but Hitler? That aggression will not stand, man.

I found the anti-corporate attitude of the first Tron a bit on-the-nose but refreshingly cheeky. It is not inherently hypocritical for big budget movies to resent a capitalist attitude, and the first Tron cared enough about advancing the medium to give its idealism a certain pluck. But the lazy application of that same philosophy here seems nothing more than a cynical appropriation of elements of the first film without a moment's thought for context. Tron: Legacy is one of the most transparently for-the-franchise movies I've ever seen, something that exists solely to cash in on nostalgia and sell a new crop of toys and video games. The film even makes itself willfully irrelevant to better ensure it doesn't rock the franchise boat.

I would have liked to see a modified vision of cyberspace, one in which the power is now disseminated among millions of users instead of a single mastermind. But Tron: Legacy has nothing to offer. It does not even work as a mildly experimental music video for Daft Punk, whose soundtrack is a notable step down from the inventiveness of their usual work, a driving but soulless buzz of squall that serves as the de facto plot momentum given how leaden the actual structure is. Having listened to the soundtrack before seeing the movie, I can say that the above-average electronica works much better in the context of the film, but it too is a disappointment.

If anything, the grid animated through modern graphics is less imaginative than the one rendered on early animating computers. The programs tend to just act like people, as if the filmmakers realized that any real focus on the aspect of a machine's "soul" would raise too many philosophical questions that would limit box office appeal and steamrolled over the subject. And where and how is there food inside the computer world for Flynn to eat? Proving the point that this movie is about nostalgia, nearly all the plot is delivered through flashbacks and reminiscences, as if we're watching the third planned film in the series after the original idea for the darker middle movie fell through during production, leaving enough completed scenes for recycling.

Tron: Legacy is a hollow, clanging piece of capitalist opportunism, a spectacle that wears out its welcome for the rigid repetition of the grid's stunted possibilities. That, in a nutshell, is the film's chief failing: even after nearly 30 years of rapidly accelerated technological advancement, computers still offer the same vastness of potential for growth. If only anyone involved cared about showing that instead of making a $170 million video of a middle-aged person finding and playing with his childhood toys. A single shot in Tron: Legacy fully caught my eye: as Quorra and Sam sit at the front of a transport ship, a POV shot of Kevin looking at them from the far end temporarily overcomes the shallow focus of 3-D and pulls the two characters out of the screen from a the middle plane of a long shot and communicates for a few seconds the kind of possibility and forward-thinking vision of user-program harmony the rest of the film brushes aside for its empty regression. What a tantalizing and frustratingly teasing three seconds they are.


*Cheap emotional manipulation without sincere character development? Wait, let me check...yep, Horowitz and Kitsis were Lost writers. Of course.

True Grit (2010)

Mine eyes have seen the glory. The Coen brothers, smartass, shaggy-dog moralists, have stripped away even the bluff of their cynicism for their most straightforward, un-ironic film. Somehow, they ended up making one of their most meditative. Their update of True Grit continues their heightened commitment to moral reckoning of late, but the evocative (and deeply misunderstood) rumination of No Country for Old Men has given way to a message that is destined to be even more overlooked, precisely because it is hidden in plain sight, uncovered by the removal of irony.

Just as the filmmaking duo put Cormac McCarthy's anti-thriller on the screen with remarkable fealty, they adapt Charles Portis' novel faithfully, more faithfully than the 1969 film starring John Wayne. Portis' book is a light read, enjoyable but sprinkled with contradictions it never addresses. In sticking to the letter of the novel, the Coens transpose those issues and undermine them without turning the material against itself.

A revenge story, True Grit opens with an aural framing device as a middle-aged Mattie Ross remembers her father's death, the image filtering into clarity from a haze like an old but vivid memory being tapped. As the image sharpens, we see a man, Mattie's father, lying in a heap at the foot of his home as his murderer, a hired hand named Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), rides away. The young Mattie (Hailee Steinfeld) heads to town to retrieve her father's body and setlle his affairs, and from the onset she comes across as shrewd beyond her 14 years. A trader uses her dad's demise as an excuse to make a quick buck, but she manages to sell back the final items her father bought from the man as well as some extra material of dubious ownership in a way that weakens the man as much as his malaria.

But her hardness carries a darker edge. Tracking the sheriff to inquire about Chaney's location, she witnesses a hanging and is unmoved by the sight of three men dropping until their necks snap. When the sheriff tells her that Chaney is out of his jurisdiction and that the U.S. Marshals will have to deal with him now, Mattie asks which Marshal she could hire. Of the ones mentioned, she settles on Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), whom the sheriff pointedly does not describe as the best man for the job but the meanest. Her drive impresses the washed-up drunk, as well as a Texas Ranger, LaBoeuf a.k.a. "La Beef" (Matt Damon), who pursues Chaney for the murder of a state senator back in his home state. Mattie insists that Chaney be hanged for killing her father and not some mere senator, a sly political statement but also one that reveals the myopic fury of her thirst for revenge.

Jeff Bridges, who received his "sorry we didn't get this to you sooner" Oscar earlier in the year for his performance in Crazy Heart, is still so alive and visceral that the joy of seeing him at last rewarded -- even with something as meaningless as an Academy Award -- is tempered by the fact that it symbolizes an atonement rather than a recognition that he still does magnificent work. I joked with friends that, as much as I've come to admire John Wayne, Bridges represented a significant upgrade. Yet it is in his desire to move away from Wayne's performance that Bridges does one of his few "acting" jobs, where you can actually catch him at the tricks he normally pulls off without ever trying. Bridges' take on Cogburn is nearly unintelligible, not only from his intoxicated mumble but in the not-all-there look in his one good eye. Wayne may not have been half the actor Bridges is, but he oozed charisma, and Bridges tries his damnedest to make the audience root for him while still undermining his own charm at every turn. It's a taxing job, but one he pulls off, as ever, brilliantly.

As much as Bridges' Cogburn is a murderous scoundrel, Mattie's support for him mirror's the audience's own, and she becomes the voice of the revenge-movie crowd. Cogburn instantly proves himself a lout, his slurred growl generating a host of laughs in the courtroom but also revealing a man who can casually kill a man under protection of the law. Mattie delights in his sadism, looking impressed when, stalking some bandits who might lead them to Chaney, Cogburn plans to plug one in the back with a rifle slug as a grim warning shot to the other gang members. Rooster is Western lawlessness, charismatic enough that he wins over the crowd, and Mattie, but so disgusting that whatever romanticism might have resided in the old, fat man's belly got vomited up during one of his many drinking spells. And still Mattie adores him, her loyalty only faltering when his alcoholism interferes with his violence. She literally cheers the spectacle of LaBoeuf and Cogburn killing others but, as with all action audiences inured to atrocity against humans, at last manages to spare emotion for the brief abuse of an animal.

The Coens never force this point, never turn True Grit into the explicit anti-Western styling of Dead Man. Playing it straight, they allow us to identify with Mattie -- a simple matter given the magnetic pull Steinfeld exerts on the audience -- and never pull the rug out from under us. Like an old Roadrunner cartoon, they simply wait for us to look down and realize we've run with Mattie right off a cliff, and that by looking down we suddenly let gravity kick back in. That they filter the voice of a primarily male audience through a young girl is but another facet of the subtlety with which they give the viewers enough rope to hang themselves.

That commitment to straight Western storytelling peppered with implication extends to the film's racial commentary: at the hanging Mattie attends at the start of the film, three man stand on the gallows. The middle sobs and begs for forgiveness for minutes, another does not repent but gets his say, but the Native American sentenced to die has a bag thrown over his head immediately, silencing him before he can orate. Cogburn never uses any slurs, but when he viciously kicks two Choctaw children off a trading post porch, Bridges puts the racism of John Wayne's West on display as clearly as it can be seen back in town where every black character is a servant to whom even Mattie lightly condescends. (I found it incredibly interesting that the audience burst into its loudest laughter at this child abuse.)

Roger Deakins' cinematography stresses earthen tones, highlighting the sickly yellow of fire and the brown of wooden structures. Deakins' immaculate deep focus certainly does not recall Robert Altman's hazy McCabe & Mrs. Miller, but the color palette sure does. The Coens tell a more straightforward Western than Altman did, but both movies undercut the sense of individuality of the West and the moral code of law by starkly showing the true results of revenge and duels, where people end up dead and not a whole lot else can be said on the matter. Furthermore, both do not actually occur in the classic West -- McCabe is up in the Pacific Northwest, True Grit back in the novel's setting of Arkansas -- allowing for chilling snow flurries that only emphasize the cold remove of all the surrounding space.

I've learned not to underestimate the Coen brothers, who have made their fourth film in a row that breaks ranks from the previous entries even as they all share a loose thematic core. The comedy in the screenplay leans more toward the outright aburdist farce of Burn After Reading than the glacial chuckles of spiritual and existential doubt in A Serious Man. They hinder Damon with a lisp after an accident leaves La Boeuf's tongue half-severed, sabotaging every dramatic moment the actor gets with the mild comedy of his thick pronunciation. The usual odd touches litter the cast, from a kindly but screwy dentist-cum-mountain man Cogburn and Mattie encounter to a gibbering loon who rides with Tom's posse. But even these broad types play into the directors' statements on the aborrent bloodlust of the Old West: that gentle and amicable dentist casually mentions how much he'd like it if Cogburn could kill a man for him. This is a society that would rather see any innocent man hanged than a guilty one go free, if not to ensure that all culpable shall face punishment then to simply ensure some entertainment to break up the monotony. I laughed as much during True Grit as I have the Coens' finest comedies, but as with A Serious Man, those chuckles occasionally caught in the throat.

With respect to spoilers, all I will say about the ending of True Grit is that it elevates the Coens' penchant for anticlimactic endings into a direct commentary on the subject matter at hand. While the endings to other films may be frustratingly oblique and the Coens' joke on us, their carefully structuring here only reinforces the notion that revenge does not bring true satisfaction. The Mattie Ross who speaks to the audience in the framing device is a spinster, and the Coens use her aged voice to communicate from that start that, however this story plays out, it will not bring true closure; if it did, she would not feel the need to keep sharing it at age 40. The novel (and especially the 1969 film) support the quest for vengeance, but the Coens deconstruct that bloodlust by giving it to the audience, just as Quentin Tarantino savaged lingering fantasies of Jewish revenge by reveling in it for Inglourious Basterds. True Grit may be the most instantly enjoyable film the Coen brothers have made since, well, the last movie they made with Jeff Bridges, but hidden in that digestible entertainment is a devastating critique of most of the people lining up to see it.

Crazy Heart

Crazy Heart deserves credit for nabbing Jeff Bridges the most awards buzz he's ever gotten. Few actors can hold a candle to Bridges, particularly in the age of method acting. Bridges doesn't need to research his character, work for a brief period of time in the character's written occupation or any other nonsense that typically involves the crew of a film putting up with an actor yelling at them because "my character is a mean person." No, Bridges has the ability to simply be the character, without having to jump through hoops and blow his own horn to do so.

Having said that, Bridges does have a personal connection to Bad Blake, albeit not nearly to the same degree as the deep tragedy that linked Mickey Rourke to his own spotlight role as Randy the Ram in The Wrestler, the film everyone has made annoyingly sure to tie to this one. With a long-held passion for country music, Bridges had the chance of a lifetime, and he proved that music was more than a hobby for him when he declined to take the part until he heard some songs attached to it. Indeed, T-Bone Burnett deserves as much of the credit as Bridges for any allure of the film; his contributions read and sound like proper country ditties from a time long past, familiar enough to add a shade of verisimilitude without sounding like cheap rip-offs.

But, as Bad Blake has learned from a lifetime of writing songs for other performers, it's the person in front of the people who matters. We meet Bridges in what simply has to be an homage to his brilliantly off-kilter role in The Big Lebowski, as Bad arrives after a long haul -- long enough to require carrying a jug for...um, in-transit relief -- to find himself at a bowling alley where he's meant to play a gig. Like the Dude, Bad's hair is unkempt, and he sports a scraggly beard, but as he sits at the alley bar, the differences become instantly apparent. Bad has years of hard living etched into his face, deep lines that don't seem to be anywhere on Jeff Bridges in the real world. He's almost always looking down, either in shame of his alcoholism or in derision of the shit dives where he's forced to ply his wares (and at himself). You can practically smell the stink on him, sweat, cigarettes and cheap booze swirling about him as a toxic cloud. If Bridges is not as intense as Rourke (no one is as intense as Rourke), he is just as able to tap into the tragedy of a person who watched as a dream gently floated out of his reach and kept plugging on because he didn't know what else to do.

Vague references are made about one Tommy Sweet, a young country star who learned everything from Blake before moving on to a lucrative solo career. Bad doesn't want to talk about it, though when we meet Tommy (Colin Farrell, who appears to be using his Sony Crockett voice with a slight twang) he's nothing but grateful for his mentor's help and eager to help him get his life on-track. Slowly, Bad realizes this, and the two begin to renew their friendship and professional relationship.

But this happens relatively quickly, and it reveals the fundamental weakness of Crazy Heart: the script. One should cut writer-director Scott Cooper a certain amount of slack for his debut, but nothing about Crazy Heart, other than Bridges and the music, seems real. Bad gives an interview to a young reporter in Santa Fe, Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal), and the two fall in love. Her young son Buddy (who, I'm sorry, is annoying) reminds Bad of a son he never got to know, and the shadow of his alcoholism hangs over the relationship until it appears in a tedious and predictable -- and almost mystical, given the sudden gaps of logic to account for the event that affects the couple -- manner.

Everyone seems to be hitting marks in this film, even Bridges, who manages to add spice here and there. The Wrestler was also clichéd and overly familiar, but it stood out not merely for Rourke's performance but the tiny details in the picture that made it true. Randy playing himself in an old NES game that's as obsolete as he is, the drunken midday singalong to Quiet Riot, these moments don't exist in Crazy Heart, busy as it is shuffling off to the next necessary plot advancement. Little aspects of Bridges' performance -- his fiddling with a door chain, the way he balances a glass full of whiskey on his chest as he lays with his shirt open and apologizes after meeting Jean for not probably not being who she wanted him to be -- make impressions, perhaps more so because nothing else does.

If Bridges receives the Oscar for his work here -- and all signs point to 'Yes' -- I suppose it might be his "better late than never" award. But his performance here is not simpering and desperate like Pacino's in Scent of a Woman; it's not even good-but-unremarkable as was Newman's in The Color of Money. No, Bridges is set to receive one of the few belated Oscars that's just as deserving for the title that won it as the body of work that secured it. I cared about Bad Blake, even as I had trouble focusing on the screen for all the eye rolling that the plot induced. You can tell he's a fuck-up from the moment you lay eyes on him, but like Jean you'll fall in love with him no matter how many times you tell yourself it's a bad idea. Crazy Heart is so by-the-numbers it might as well be a country standard, but all you need to do is hitch your wagon to Bridges and the rundown Suburban he drives across the Southwest in the film and he'll see you through to the end.

Carpenter's Tools: Starman

What fresh Carpenter is this? After establishing himself as one of the best niche directors, well, ever, he stumbled slightly with the Stephen King adaptation Christine, a noticeably commercial attempt to make up for the tepid receipts from The Thing. Carpenter believed that The Thing fared poorly because it came out the same year as Steven Spielberg's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. How perfectly fitting, then, that he should direct perhaps the finest of the "E.T. clones" made throughout the mid-'80s to capitalize on the massive success of the benevolent alien story.

Working with a script by Bruce A. Evans (who would later find great success with his screenplay for Stand By Me, funnily enough another King adaptation), Carpenter placed himself far outside of his comfort zone. It probably irked the Hawks disciple to be placed into a niche in the first place, but he certainly made the most of his shifted career path. With this film, however, the director proved that he could hop genres with style, even if he rarely ventured outside horror-action again.

But stepping outside of the pigeonhole means little to the film in question. No, what makes Starman so wonderful, so light and so affecting are the superb performances Carpenter draws from his actors. After the embarrassing casting of Christine, Carpenter is back to drawing the finest from those in front of his lens, and he actually manages to get good performances from much of his secondary cast (remember how bad everyone who wasn't Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasence and Nick Castle were in Halloween?). He also handles Evans' light, feel-good script with both the sweetness of that aspect as well as the tension of those who seek to hurt our benign visitor.

The Starman comes to Earth after intercepting the Voyager II probe, which contains selections of music as well as a recorded greeting from the head of the U.N. He crashes in Madison, Wisconsin, and assumes human form when he scans a lock of hair in a photo album and clones the DNA. Then a woman (Karen Allen) wakes up to find her dead husband in her living room. Understandably, this shakes poor Lisa up, and it likely doesn't help that this alien, who looks like her husband, bids her to take him to Arizona.

Jeff Bridges' performance as the Starman is nothing short of fantastic: he gleaned his only knowledge of Earth's languages and syntax from the recorded greetings and songs, so Bridges delivers his dialogue in halting, emphasized staccatos. Bridges is one of the best actors in the business because the very last thing he appears concerned with on-screen is his appearance. Not many actors could contort their faces as wildly as Bridges does when the Starman minces through a sentence, and fewer still could pull it off without desperately mugging for laughs. These moments are funny, yes, but only because Bridges sells them with sincerity and Allen plays the straight woman well.

This light tone defines even the film's serious moments, such as the Starman using his powers to bring a shot deer back to life or Lisa's struggle to separate the sight of her husband from this advanced life form. The military gets wind of the alien's presence, and of course it's run by a cold-hearted intelligence chief who wants to kill the Starman and then ask it questions. One of the scientists in his think-tank, though, voices dissent. "We invited him here!" Mark Shermin yells, referring to the Voyager II probe found in the Starman's ship.

These characters are all so much fun -- Carpenter's inherent flair for camp creeps through, certainly with Bridges but even the NSA chief Fox -- and the dialogue is charming and funny enough, that you can almost forget the compulsory nature of the script. Why does the Starman need to go to Arizona? Because that's where his brethren will meet him, and if he's not there in three days, he'll be abandoned to die on the planet. Why can't the all-powerful race, who have nothing to fear from humans and their silly missiles, wait a day or two? And I nearly winced when the Starman gives an uplifting mini-speech near the end to Shermin that not only casually drops the fact that these aliens visited Earth before and have been monitoring it for some time but lays on the saccharine goo with its exultation of mankind. "You are at your very best when things are at their worst," says the dying Starman. Dying must have clouded his memory somewhat because, apart from Lisa and Shermin, everyone he comes across on his journey tries to capture him, beat him or kill him.

Nevertheless, it earns its bittersweet ending, and Carpenter, the man who made a name for himself as a master of suspense, proves able to coax sweeter emotion from this film with only the slightest prodding. Jack Nitzsche's score sound reminiscent of Carpenter's usual style at first, but it morphs into a gentler soundtrack, in some ways an aural cue of Carpenter's transition in the film. As much as I wish that the plot didn't drive a story in which a woman has a chance to reconnect with a visage of her dead husband, even if that visage isn't him and never will be, is food enough for one film. Actually, Solaris already proved that. But with Bridges, Allen and Carpenter steering things, Starman achieves an honest sentimentality it doesn't quite deserve. Because let's face it: it takes a supreme coordination of talent on-set to make a line like, "I gave you a baby tonight" not doom a picture straight to the MST3K files.

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

In the late ’90s, a snarky British gossip rag journalist named Toby Young found himself working at Vanity Fair, mainly because its editor-in-chief, Graydon Carter, saw a lot of himself in the young man. What followed was a five-year tenure that could generously be described as disastrous, during which he wore inappropriate clothing, vomited on people, desperately tried to get any woman he could and sent a strippergram to work on Bring Your Daughter to Work Day.

Eventually Carter’s nostalgia gave way to the realization that he was paying someone who only typed 3,000 words over the course of years that managed to make it past the editors and censors, and sent Young back to England. Upon his return, Young penned the memoir sourced for the film. Indeed, many of the events of the book make it into the film, albeit toned down even for an “R” rating. The names have all been changed to protect identities, with even Toby being renamed Sidney, though you’d assume he’d have no problem with his identity being used.

He shows up at the office of Sharps editor Clayton Harding (Jeff Bridges) wearing a crude T-shirt and gets assigned to captioning photos — a necessity in a magazine, but hardly worth importing someone from England for. As the son of a baron (or lord, in the film version), Young has his credit cards printed with “Hon” for Honorable in front of his name to impress women, but can’t stop embarrassing himself long enough to ever mention it.

The more Sidney immerses himself into the celebrity scene (or tries to, at least), the more he learns the sordid truth about the shallowness of its stars and the twisted relationship between their agents and the magazines. The big publicist is Eleanor Johnson (Gillian Anderson), who ensures all her clients get positive print from Sharps. Young rebels at the notion of pampering a host of untalented celebrities and ends up annoying everyone from Harding to his immediate supervisor, Allison (Kirsten Dunst).

The problem with the transition is that Sidney loses his teeth. Played by the lovely Simon Pegg in the latest of his woeful miscasts in American films, he comes off as a charmer who nobly takes a stand against bowing to the demands of Eleanor, but makes nothing but mistakes. He often spits food on the rich and famous inadvertently, gets slapped a lot and even accidentally kills a dog.

In real life, Toby Young displayed the classic stalker mentality of desperately wanting to be in the limelight of the famous and to simultaneously tear it down. The more he discovered about the vapidity of the celebrity scene, the more he placed himself into a level of post-irony normally reserved for Andy Kaufman, self-destructing in some poorly thought out scheme of revolution.

Here, he’s simply an inept fool. The best and only glimpse we get of Young’s style in the film comes when he chats with an pretentious, overrated, Tarantino-ripoff director and cheerfully insists that “Con Air” is the greatest film of all time to get a rise out of him. The most infuriating thing about this adaptation is that moments like these are cast aside in favor of the lame insertion of a hackneyed love story.

The only friend Young has is Allison, but he longs for the beautiful, but vacant Sophie Maes (Megan Fox). I never really understood the fuss over Fox, as, depending on the camera angle in “Transformers,” she looked different and strange. If I learned nothing else from this film (and I didn’t), it’s that Michael Bay truly is a terrible director, because she actually looks like a human here. She also turns in a surprisingly solid comedic performance and holds her own against Pegg, albeit only because the film so thoroughly neuters him.

Of course, he eventually realizes who’s really stuck by him; yadda yadda yadda, you know how it will end, and it derails what was meant to be a scathing indictment of tabloid/fashion/pop culture journalism on a level “The Devil Wears Prada” does not even begin to approach. The acting is uniformly excellent, except for Dunst, who is at her usual loathsome “abilities.” Even Pegg gets laughs despite being far too charming to play Young.

However, in cutting down Toby’s exploits to ensure at least some teenagers could get in, it also removes the bile, and indeed the humor, from the story. What we’re left with is a clumsy, by-the-numbers romantic comedy with only occasional flashes of journalistic satire. Actually, it seeks to be a comedic parody of Federico Fellini's masterpiece La Dolce Vita; at one point Allison even cites it as her favorite film, and the finale takes place at a lawn screening of the classic. Yes, it's that kind of film.