Capsule Reviews: Moulin Rouge!, A Corner in Wheat, 31/75 Aysl

Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, 2001)

A pop culture kaleidosope-cum-travesty, Moulin Rouge! is as unbearable as it is enthralling, always at once, all throughout the film. The exclamation point in the title is actually the most subtle element of the whole shebang. It's like a Girl Talk musical, running through fragments of a vast range of music in blitzkrieg assaults of color and choreography. Though I don't know where on Earth the people who get emotionally invested in its paper-thin romance narrative are coming from, the film's aesthetic smorgasbord makes for an unforgettable, transfixing experience. Tim Brayton said it best, even if I can't match his level of enthusiasm: "Five minutes of the film can be exhausting; two hours is the most invigorating, blissful experience that cinema can offer."

The performances are fantastic: Ewan McGregor has rarely been more attractive, Nicole Kidman definitely hasn't, and Jim Broadbent has never been more boisterously endearing. Jill Bilcock's editing feeds every shot through a meat grinder, but Donald McAlpine's lurid throwback to Technicolor and Catherine Martin's vibrant art and costume design are still striking. Luhrmann's bombastic setpieces take choreography and romantic melodrama to gaudy extremes, and it's funny how this, his most bewildering picture, is also his most coherent and successful. I have no grade for this film; it's an A+ and an F at the same time and averaging out to a C doesn't remotely give the right impression of my feelings for it.

A Corner in Wheat (D.W. Griffith. 1909)

With its rapid editing between financially shaken-down commonfolk and monopolizing wheat tycoons, D.W. Griffith's A Corner in Wheat presages Soviet montage not merely in aesthetic but political thrust. His intercutting is darkly humorous: boisterous, lavish parties of the rich mix with static tableaux of miserable, exorbitant breadlines that feel like Griffith somehow went through time and brought back photographs of the Depression to splice into his moving picture. Even when they move, the poor trudge like zombies, and when the bread runs out all too quickly, the sense of despair only compounds. Griffith's grim comeuppance for the tycoon who starves the people to add $4 million a day to his coffers is a literal burial in riches, a macabre joke I didn't know Griffith had in him, but then I've only seen Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. The depiction of the middle class being driven into poverty to compound the wealth of the rich is, of course, more relevant than ever 112 years later.

31/75 Aysl (Kurt Kren, 1975)

Shooting over 21 non-consecutive days with the same strips of film and an alternating masking board with altering alignments of holes, Kren's 31/75 Asyl turns a static shot into an ever-changing tableaux of colliding light exposures and alternating time periods. The shifting areas of black space and splotches of countryside comprising differing days and lighting/weather conditions make a pointillist landscape, like satellite TV in a storm. When Kren drops the black space altogether for a moment, he's left with a pan-seasonal collage where winter snow rubs against spring bloom, the multiple timeframes glimpsed in the alternating patches of light and exposure now fully visible. I confess I don't know what it "means," but Kren's structuralist experiment is fascinating, beautiful and suggestive, calling attention to the way time affects all images even as they are constructed.

Brian De Palma: Carlito's Way

I used to think Carlito's Way was, to quote the popular interpretation, an "apology" for Scarface, a toned-down, mature take on that film's criminal excess that depicts a gangster trying to redeem himself rather than climb the ranks of the underworld. After revisiting that film, however, I can better see what De Palma was doing with his first, more grandiose view of the criminal underworld and, with unorthodox focus, how it affected America's rising Latino population. Nevertheless, this film, with its ever-moving but graceful camera, bold use of color and flagrant romanticism, not only proves the superior view of criminal life but also stands as perhaps De Palma's finest achievement as a filmmaker and the best balance of his confrontationally probing camera and the mainstream Hollywood elegance of which he wanted to be a part.

This mix of the daring with the quotidian might explain why so many mistook the film for a mildly original take on a tired subject. But to see how the film subverts and analyzes clichés, one need look no farther than the opening, a monochromatic framing device that spoils all pretense at suspense by showing the titular hero murdered by way of introduction. De Palma uses the sequence not only to set in motion his aesthetic approach—using his Steadicam shots as POV representations of Carlito's view, up to and including the slow pivot upside down and pull back as Carlito's soul leaves his body—but to make sure that we spend the film not wondering what happens to Carlito but why this doomed scenario occurs.

Brian De Palma: Casualties of War

On a first viewing, I found Casualties of War to be a fitfully intriguing, if overly quotidian Vietnam film that offered up a unique story but a predictable payoff. Furthermore, the tonal upheaval that occurs in the final act turned what had been one of Brian De Palma's most solid films into a well-meaning but sappy liberal morality play. Looking at it now, however, I see one of De Palma's better films, and a slyly literal take on the illegality of war that proposes such a simple, self-evident solution that it never seems to come to mind: what if someone actually took the horror and wrongness of war to court?

Unlike a court-martial film, Casualties of War is neither about a kangaroo court to make an example of the enlisted or a demonstration of the rotten chain of command. In fact, it isn't about the trial itself but the courage to bring one's fellow soldiers to that trial, overcoming self-doubt over incriminating one's fellow servicemen and intense pressure from everyone else to let the whole thing go. Coming off the upswing of strong (and strongly critical) Vietnam films like Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, De Palma's film sticks firmly with the men on the ground. Less forgiving than Stone's semi-autobiographical film and less heady than Kubrick's movie, De Palma's feature shows the same breakdown of sanity and humanity not as the result of an officious, out-of-touch command but of the absence of any clear structure in an environment so confusing the trees themselves seem to be hostile.

Gamer

Gamer suffered from such an abysmal marketing campaign that I never once even cared enough to bother looking at the names listed under the director credit. A film targeted at the attention-deficit, violence-inured current generation, it met with general derision in trailer form before a host of the same mindless entertainment it clearly wanted to comment upon. Even your friend and humble narrator joined in the chorus of sighs that greeted the final shot of Ludacris telling the audience, "This is not something you can control!" with all the actorly sincerity he could muster, and only the presence of the handful of proper adults in this college town theater stopped youths from making the dismissive hand-wanking motion, a sort of cynical version of The Wave. Nearly a year elapsed until I finally discovered what I'd somehow missed: Gamer was a Neveldine/Taylor project. Why, oh why, didn't I look into this beforehand.

Taking into account the self-admitted attention deficiency of the filmmakers, allow me to be brief: Gamer is one of the most daring, avant-garde mainstream films in recent memory, alongside Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Inglourious Basterds and Domino. It is, as much as any sociopolitical tract, a movie about The Way We Live Now, but rather than sit back and discuss cultural perspectives in a way that allows critics and other audiences to more easily dissect its meanings, it embodies that which it examines. There are innumerable examples of films in the first category being provocative and great -- The Social Network, for example, mines the same territory as Neveldine/Taylor's movie via dialogue and more lyrical direction -- but Gamer belongs in that rare breed of films that do not always work, but only because they reach for something fare more difficult to grasp. Jean-Luc Godard rightfully viewed filmmaking as the purest form of criticism, because all art is commentary on some level and film allows the critic to criticize through embodiment of that which is being critiqued. To be sure, Neveldine and Taylor are not critical in nearly the same fashion as Godard, but their frenetic embrace of the way information has processed in the two decades since Internet usage has completely rewired the brain makes them the best filmmakers currently depicting an attention-deficit world.

A title card cheekily informs the audience that the film occurs "some years from this exact moment," a wry bit of humor but also a way of communicating that, like all dystopic fiction, Gamer is directly extrapolated from from sociopolitical conditions of the present. Thus, it projects a future that is even more dominated by the immediacy of self-satisfaction than the one we have now: the masses consume the latest fad like a swarm of piranha, stripping it to the bone in minutes before moving on to the next big thing. Coupled with a more philosophical extrapolation of Moore's Law, the accurate prediction by Intel's co-founder that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on a computer chip doubles every two years, this rapid consumption of the new fuses the exponential breakthroughs in technological advancement with a consumer base hungry to make all those breakthroughs turn huge profits.

Thus, Gamer exists in a neoliberal nightmare, in which consumerism has grown to such mania that the entrepreneurs of the world have effectively taken over governments. As with a number of dystopic films, Gamer posits a society that uses death row inmates as entertainment, teasing them with the faint hope of freedom in exchange for putting their condemned bodies on the line to risk grislier deaths than they'd ever suffer in a lethal injection. By broadcasting these events, the man behind "Slayers," Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall), creates such a lucrative enterprise that he single-handedly pays for America's penal system, which is brutally taxing state budgets back here in the present, to the point that privatization of prisons is already occurring. The use of death-row prisoners as slave labor no longer has the connotation of mere satire: prison labor is already happening, a means for corporations that invest in penitentiaries to get cheap work in return, maximizing their investments.

John Tillman (Gerard Butler), renamed Kable by an adoring crowd that needs a snappier name, becomes the unofficial star of Slayers for surviving 27 games, far more than any other prisoner. If he completes 30 matches, he gets to go free, though everyone appears to look forward to the potential release of a killer they also feel deserved a death sentence. Like a college football player, Kable makes millions for everyone but himself, luxury labor that makes the owners rich but the actual workers unpaid. He doesn't even realize how many people around the world are cheering him on; if he had any concept of the money he personally brings in to Castle's empire, he might reasonably demand some of those profits. But then who would pay a prisoner?

But the corruption of America's prison system does not particularly connect to the kinetic, addled vision of the modern world: to make matters more interesting, Castle's Slayers runs on a technology the wunderkind invented that allows people to control other human beings. In effect, Slayers ups the ante considerably over, say, Death Race 2000 because it turns the carnage into a video game that necessitates direct involvement over passive spectating. Death Race 2000 was extrapolated from a generation that still looked to television for mindless entertainment; Gamer represents the cultural evolution of the present. A society raised on video games and the consumer power of the Internet, in which everything from entertainment to facts themselves can be programmed according to taste, is more apt to demand hands-on interaction.

And because they've spent a generation or two growing increasingly inured to violence, they can gather in stadiums to watch inmates be controlled by teenagers and fat shut-ins and cheer with each death. Castle's other invention to come out of his nanite technology is Society, the ultimate endpoint of The Sims and Second Life, where people are paid to be the avatars of players who can control an actual human being and live out their fantasy life. Naturally, the section of city carved out for Society is a lurid, hedonistic explosion of glitter and cum, a den of sin that projects the aesthetic and sensual hollowness of a strip club onto a large section of metropolis. Where Slayers feeds into bloodlust with its desaturated look, cloudy haze and urban rubble, Society is shiny, shiny, too shiny. It looks as if a hentai cartoon vomited on a Lady Gaga album cover.


What links Society and Slayers is the uncomfortable suggestion of the future of the working class. With menial labor being outsourced to save corporations even more money or being done by programmed machine, the disparity between skilled and unskilled labor in terms of wages and living conditions is wider than ever in this country. Kable's wife, Angie (Amber Valletta), must makes ends meet with her husband in prison by becoming one of the Society avatars. Each day, a fat man glued to a chair consuming junk food sends her out to be screwed so he can watch a hot woman reamed. Even porno is interactive, it seems. (that too, to my utter amazement, is not an invention but merely an expansion of something that exists now). The poor, then, become the literal playthings of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy after spending so many centuries as figurative playthings. As Castle sees it, one can be paid to be a character or pay to be a player. Capitalism in action. (This treatment of Angie also suggests that, even in a world that caters so exclusively to the id as this, slut-shaming is still ingrained in the patriarchal consciousness.)

This neoliberal lack of any sort of regulation, of reveling in the misery and indentured servitude of human beings, is founded on a harsh vision of Social Darwinism: Angie goes to see her caseworker about regaining custody of her daughter, but the man notes that she has been placed with a wealthy family and that the girl wouldn't have as good a life with "people like you." Class warfare continues to rage, and those who must prostitute themselves or risk their lives are viewed as inferior. Of course it's alright to cheer for the deaths of the I-Cons; after all, they went to prison, right? And no one has ever been falsely imprisoned, especially when corporations can tap the inmate pool at will for labor. Simon, the rich, spoiled 17-year-old who controls Kable in battle, views him as a toy, having justified the man's sure guilt in his head and done his best to keep the man alive simply to prove his own prowess as a gamer. Simon hasn't had to work a day in his life, yet he literally holds power over a man's life (and the lives of all the other prisoners he kills through Kable). And until a mysterious, anti-Castle organization known as Humanz (a revolutionary cabal as led by Banksy), sends him a modification for the nanites in Tillman's brain that allows two way communication, he never once considered what the man he operates thought about all this.

Earlier I compared Kable to a college football player, and the same hypocrisy that surrounds the ethics of not paying players extends to the ludicrous sense of good form here. Simon gets flagged for cheating for (reluctantly) letting the man he controls go free before his time, and the fans turn to jeering detractors who spam his wall with cries of "Cheater!" By displaying a slight amount of humanity, Simon will be casually dismissed with the same flippancy that he himself previously called things "gay."

As for Castle himself, he exists in pure B-movie fashion, the identifiable head of an organization that has infiltrated society to such an extent that taking down one person could never undo it. But, in the movies, all you need is to take down the head. However, Castle recalls numerous heads of mega-corporations specializing in entertainment and leisure. Neveldine & Taylor say they modeled Castle as a loose amalgam of "Mark Cuban and Bill Clinton," but he could just as easily stand in for Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, figureheads who become the personification of a brand. When someone complains about Facebook's privacy issues, is a personal insult on Zuckerberg's exaggerated personal stake into reading everyone's secrets far behind? The entire reason Castle arranges for Kable to be killed before reaching his 30th match is to ensure he remains the true face of Slayers.

But the questions of identity raised by the film compound the issue of who, if anyone, could be considered the face of anything. Tillman becomes Kable to further emphasize his loss of identity, and though his face adorns the Slayers ads plastered on every building, it is Simon who is the top player? Or is it? Back at the prison/training ground, one of the guards at the rifle range reverently asks Tillman, "Who aims? The player or the Slayer?" Kable responds that his player might see what's going on, but it's ultimately up to him to pull the trigger as the split-second lag between Simon's command and his brain receiving the information could leave him open to death. Ergo, Tillman deserves more credit for his success than simply being Simon's conduit, but that also means he shares in the culpability of mass murder for spectacle. Castle's overriding use of nanites allow him to take over more than simply a player in a gruesome game of his making: having made Tillman one of the first test subjects of his technology, he owns a piece of Kable's identity as well, and his way of connecting millions, maybe even billions through his entrepreneurship, might soon become more literal.


All of these ideas swirl around what is, fundamentally, a conventionally structured science fiction thriller. In their (often hilarious) commentary track, Neveldine and Taylor acknowledge the influence of '80s action films on Gamer, and it is by far their most straightforward picture in terms of plotting. We move from seeing Kable in action to slowly uncovering his back story and how it conveniently connects him to the grand villain, leading to a showdown that pits massive social upheaval on the outcome but is ultimately fought on more personal terms.

Yet the film also displays the duo's typical avant-garde aesthetic, now condensed just enough to turn the pure anarchy of the Crank series toward a more honed form of satire (and even a bit of anti-satire, for the filmmaking team are as gleefully turned-on by their antics as they are revelatory of a cultural mindset). Even outside Society and Slayers, the epileptic pops of light roll over the film, whether flashing in strobes through the holes of the prisoner transport that takes what few I-Cons survive back to the penitentiary or exploding in holographic computer displays that fill entire rooms with images of porn, commerce and entertaining violence. Their vision of the future is so chaotic that even the conservative groundswell of humanism that is Humanz could never be mistaken for a Luddite group for all their anti-technological screeds because the members themselves have grown up in the same wild environment, and even their hacks have an element of childish amusement to them (they use crude and lewd animations to insult Castle).

It never ceases to amaze me how Neveldine and Taylor can be so arrhythmic with their editing yet create a decently clear sense of continuity. Where, say, Michael Bay continues to haphazardly edit his action scenes in an inept fashion, a garish display of thick-headed cluelessness, Neveldine/Taylor rank with Tony Scott as some of the few filmmakers who can not only push action cinema to its gaudiest extreme but make something that flows out of the insane result. Behind-the-scenes discussion on the home video release reveals that the duo did not storyboard their giant Slayers and Society sets, simply setting loose extras, stuntmen and effects teams and following behind with a camera, catching all that caught the eye. It's a seemingly random approach, one informed by their A.D.D., but it leads to a presentation that teases the audience even as it adds up to a complete picture. They may foist a loose hodgepodge of imagery and sound onto us, but it works. For all their trickery, I have had a much easier time sorting out the spatial relationships of objects in the frame during the most frenetic moments of Neveldine/Taylor films than I do with the average work of sub-Greengrass shaky-cam action. And only Neveldine/Taylor can get away with the use of 1st-person camera in shooting scenes, recalling video game playing in such a way that, while we are still frustratingly spectators instead of controllers, that frustration is played against itself to show how quickly a film audience will turn on the medium when reminded of something that lets them interact with their entertainment.

Gamer inspired as much derision as all other Neveldine/Taylor movies upon its release, and I certainly didn't rush out to defend it, though I might have if I'd been interested enough by its marketing campaign to check who helmed the project. There have been defenders, however, and none more impressive than cultural critic Steven Shaviro, who penned a towering, 10-000 word defense of the film that goes into much greater detail on the neoliberal extrapolations and the crises of identity posited by the film. I feel critics too often avoid saying they don't understand something, so it behooves me to admit that I don't get large swaths of Shaviro's essay (I always had to work at understanding philosophy, so when he wades into it I occasionally get lost). But it is a fascinating read that breaks down the film in ways that the makers most assuredly never thought of. Shaviro says that Gamer isn't really satire but an embrace of its warped view, and that's probably true: in their commentary, neither Neveldine nor Taylor discuss any deeper thoughts to their process, even if the sheer cleverness of the details of their action shooting suggests more active minds than they let on*. But they also display a keen ability to gauge society as it is now and expand from there, and if the critical element is underdeveloped, the sheer accuracy of its projection allows the audience to make its own commentary without the setback of being forced to sit through a lecture.

Very much a genre film, Gamer is also proof that people should stop considering that some sort of setback. I don't know when critics stopped accepting B-movies as legitimate artistic endeavors (presumably some time after critics accepted B-movies as the only legitimate artistic endeavors), but Gamer offers more than exceedingly well-made action sequences. If it is not a commentary, it is at least a summation of our times. Apart from a deliciously show-stealing performance from Hall, all Southern drawl and arrogance, everyone else is very much locked into the more rigid, inexpressive roles defined by their types. But that is merely the identifiable anchor for the rest of the film, which breaks so many boundaries that one forgets how normal its structure is. The Crank movies may be better examples of the pure artistic anarchy Neveldine and Talyor are capable of, but Gamer demonstrates how daring they can be when actually aiming at something. Perhaps it will grow in stature as the years wear on, or perhaps not. Either way, I can only regret not seeing this ingenious work when it came out and will do my best to make up for lost time. But that's the great thing about genre movies: not only can they be smart, they're a damn sight esier to return to with frequency.


**They are, however, magnificently witty, and their commentary, apart from being surprisingly revealing when it came to their aesthetic, was also delightfully freewheeling. My favorite excerpt: "We hired a speech coach to beat the Scottish out of him [Gerard Butler]. As you can see in this scene, he was an overpaid speech coach."

1989 Rewind: Casualties of War

For the first hour of Brian De Palma's Casualties of War, I simply could not accept it. Its characters were too savage, its dialogue too obvious and too much of it felt simply like a retread of common Vietnam tropes. Then I reconsidered it and, though the dialogue is still weak, Casualties of War contains some of the best acting to grace a war film, as well as one hell of a dark message.

Most war films introduce us to our characters as rookies or at least at a point when they still have a modicum of optimism about them. These men are grizzled, but still lighthearted, give or take a low-ranking officer or NCO. Into this group comes a fresh-faced, idealistic volunteer who will invariably act as the sole voice of reason when the more experienced men finally snap, which they tend to do when the gentlest of the veterans, the conscience of the group, fall prey either to enemy or friendly fire.

Casualties of War follows this to a T, but where it takes a bold step is in its decision to kill that calm vet (Erik King) in the first act. Cpl. Brownie takes a bullet to the neck when the VC ambushes the squad on break, immediately driving a wedge between the noble youth, Pfc. Max Eriksson (Michael J. Fox), and the rest of the troops, led by Sgt. Tony Meserve (Sean Penn). For the first stage of the film, there is an unspoken, underplayed struggle for the soul of Brownie's replacement, Diaz (John Leguizamo).

"War is hell," as the old adage says, but De Palma really puts it to the test when Meserve takes his men to the nearest village looking for revenge for both the deaths of his men as well as the attack cutting their leave short. The troops devastate the village looking for Viet Cong, and Meserve at last snaps and takes a young girl with the squad in retaliation. Eriksson reflects our horror when Meserve announces that she'll "tend to the men's needs."

De Palma structures Casualties of War around a terrifying gang rape scene, one of the most disturbing and repulsive (yet not exploitative) ever filmed. Eriksson tries desperately to sate the men before they cross that line, and even manages to convince Diaz. Then the other three, who have been waiting for their moment, pounce on him. Meserve, driven totally insane at this point by the jungle, cannot understand why Eriksson can't be a team player, so he lobs insults at the young soldier. He must be a communist sympathizer or, worse, a homosexual. Meserve makes open death threats as his two lackeys chuckle. Diaz, cowed by the lashing, falls in line with the others, and Eriksson must watch as the four men take turns with this poor, shrieking girl. Later, the squad stages a fight with some VC soldiers, and during the fight all four of the rapists end up shooting her for trying to escape.

The stark horror of the rape sequence might seem enough to burn the film into our retinas, but really it works because of the actors. Fox might be typecast as the wholesome kid just trying to do the right thing, but he's a believable soldier, one sent to die simply because his name came up in a "lottery." Leguizamo, King and John C. Reilly excel in some of their earliest performances (this was Reilly's debut) and round out the cast nicely. But Sean Penn's deranged Meserve will keep people coming back for more. As we are dropped in the middle of their tours with these men, we don't see Meserve slowly fade into some sort of animal: he's like that from the start. On the surface, he looks like the sort of soldier the Army would be desperate to prop up as a poster boy: loyal, uncompromising, intimidating. Yet he is a force of darkness, everything wrong and amoral concerning the US involvement in Vietnam personified. He's so deluded that he actually convinces himself that his sex slave is a VC prisoner. A recurring theme of De Palma's work is his linking of the man's sex drive and his capacity for shocking violence, and it's unforgettably displayed here but it wouldn't have worked if you didn't fully buy Penn's madness.

This second act is riveting and horrifying. It paints the jungles of Vietnam as a place where the American ideal, the human ideal even, died slowly and painfully. That's why the third act feels so tacked on, a paltry excuse to give the film some sort of uplifting coda, possibly to avoid outrage over the depictions of these soldiers. Upon returning to base, Eriksson pleads his case to all who will listen, but the top brass, in profane, definite terms, tell him to drop the matter. The last thing they need is another PR nightmare. But Eriksson persists, and justice is had.

After everything that preceded these last 40 minutes, the ending feels hollow. De Palma did such a great job of laying bare the atrocities good old American boys could commit when placed in a situation entirely beyond their ken, and this might have been one of the great Vietnam films had it simply ended with the men returning to base, leaving all the evidence back in the jungle but carrying everything with them. To show the nightmare of their existence and try to say "Oh, but one person really can make a difference" after the second act does nothing but viciously repudiate this brings the film to a screeching halt. And it certainly doesn't help that the actors must deliver David Rube's lines; Rube is a playwright and it shows, as the characters seem to be projecting their lines at an audience instead of interacting with one another. As a result, Casualties of War starts strong but finishes with a whimper, one that in no way affects the excellent work from its actors. Sean Penn fans, or even detractors, should find this an excellent find, as it contains one of his best performances.

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.

Righteous Kill

In 1995, Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino, who are tied for second in my book on the list of all-time greatest cinematic actors behind Marlon Brando, appeared in a scene together for the first time in the film “Heat.” For many, Michael Mann’s near three-hour masterpiece was worth the price of admission alone. Fast forward 13 years, and someone finally put out a movie full of Al and Bob interaction. Sadly, thanks to a shoddy script and director Jon Avnet’s inept cinematography, “Righteous Kill” is an utter waste of a golden opportunity.

DeNiro and Pacino play, respectively, Turk and Rooster, two aging yet still gung-ho detectives who suddenly find that all those bad guys who got acquitted by juries are turning up dead. Before long, they, along with the two prerequisite brash, younger detectives (John Leguizamo and Donnie Wahlberg) come to the conclusion that only a cop could have committed the crimes. As they investigate, the brazen Turk finds himself constantly in hot water with the lieutenant, played by the marvelous character actor Brian Dennehy, and in a bizarre relationship with another detective, Karen (Carla Gugino).

Karen’s sexual quirks and general behavior make her far and away the most entertaining character, yet Avnet takes the beautiful, talented and interesting Gugino and shoves her to the side to make room for more Pacino and DeNiro time. The whole film revolves around our old buddy cops. As Internal Affairs breathes down their necks, the two go to bat for each other and make sure both are absolved.

One officer remarks that “they’re like Lennon and McCartney.” That analogy is ridiculous and it doesn’t even work; it means to say that the two are so close there must be some friction, but Lennon and McCartney came to loathe each other with such a passionate hate that, if harnessed, could have broken the world of oil dependency even before Carter’s administration. That bit of ineptness serves as a microcosm for the film’s mistakes.

The inherent problem with this wannabe thriller is evident from the start. It opens with a character’s confession on a grainy surveillance camera, which immediately knocks the list of suspects down to two, including any twist that might come along. What writer Russell Gerwitz doesn’t seem to understand is that a twist ending makes for suspense, and you can’t even have a twist ending when you narrow the options down to two.

A good mystery gives you a veritable avalanche of suspects; this chucks a melting snowball at you. To cover up for the thin plot, Avnet frantically edits scenes together to make it more exciting, which not only doesn’t work, but cuts scenes before Pacino and DeNiro can really come alive.

He also uses a lot of unnecessary tricks; there are tracking shots in the Coens’ “Burn After Reading” that follow the hollow footsteps of CIA paper pushers as they travel to and from the office of their superiors. That shot was a visual metaphor for the ineffectiveness and waste of the organization; here, Avnet aims the camera at the floor, seemingly chasing a light refraction the way a cat tries to catch a laser pointer.

His sloppy cuts ironically render Pacino’s and DeNiro’s scenes meaningless, and those scenes push the interesting cast of supporting actors out of the way. In the end, Pacino and Leguizamo get in some great one-liners, Gugino and Dennehy are horribly under-utilized, and we get only one genuinely entertaining scene between the two titans. It’s a crying shame because these two actually put in some of their best acting in years; DeNiro brought back his snarling venom normally reserved for Scorsese films, and Pacino even dropped those annoying “hoo-ha’s” and “whoa’s.”

Nevertheless, the utter lack of suspense, coupled with more stumbling ineptitude from Jon Avnet (who released “88 Minutes,” Al Pacino’s worst film to date, earlier this year) broke “Righteous Kill’s” leg before it managed to get out of the gate.