Pain & Gain (Michael Bay, 2013)

As an introductory statement of theme, Daniel Lugo’s (Mark Wahlberg) maxim “I believe in fitness” invokes “I believe in America” less than “I was born a poor black child.” An improbably charismatic bodybuilder who has internalized boilerplate self-motivating one-liners as Zen profundity, Daniel’s drive contrasts sharply with the limitations of his milieu, his can-do attitude employed only to surge recruitment for the gym where he works as he continues to collect a meager paycheck for his troubles.

Danny (and most of the other prominent characters given a voiceover) constantly references the pull of the American Dream, but he his ostensible commitment to hard work is merely a smokescreen for a shortcut to wealth in the form of a plan to kidnap and extort a particularly loathsome client, Victor Kershaw (Tony Shaloub). Victor mirrors Daniel’s physical achievements with financial ones, his boasts of assets triggering something primal in Daniel. One man’s dedication to honing his body as a sign of his discipline pulls in pathetic wages while a lanky, out-of-shape twerp sits back and enjoys the good life. As Daniel later tells Victor, he does not merely want want Victor wants, he wants Victor not to have it.

The Yards (James Gray, 2000)

James Gray's The Yards is, like everything else he's made in his sadly infrequent career, a bold mix of classical, Fordian technique and Cassavetian acting whose alchemical properties transcend the clash of sensibilities into something simultaneously raw and operatic. Uniformly excellent acting never plays the material as merely symbolic, even if its view of corruption as a fixture of post-industrial commerce certainly offers its share of commentary. Its ending works because of its deflation, a true abstention from a system that offers no good option and therefore makes a simple act of quitting a kind of victory in its admission of defeat.

My full article is up at Movie Mezzanine.

We Own the Night (James Gray, 2007)

James Gray opens We Own the Night with a brief montage of gritty black-and-white still photographs of policemen in the late 1980s. These photos could be a time-capsule for a pre-Giuliani New York, still dangerous, still filthy. Still human, too: a photo of a cop jokingly playing with a finger puppet policeman with a gun breaks up the severe tone of the other stills and seems as foreign to the city as it exists now as the grime that got swept away to make way for hiked rents. But this montage also makes the introduction of Joaquin Phoenix's club owner, Bobby Green, that much more striking. Gray cuts suddenly to the actor in a florid red silk shirt, walking in slow-motion toward the moll (Eva Mendes) lazing on his gold-colored couch in a gold-colored frame. It is the flip-side of the stark photographs' depiction of New York sleaze, the color-drenched euphoria of those who rule as banal warlords over their turf, however small it is.

The juxtaposition of this sweltering, stylish melodrama with the earlier, ascetic realism likewise offers a clue into Gray's approach for the film: always intimately focused with fly-on-the-wall shots that capture the smallest expressions on an actor's face, but framed epically in the style of Michael Cimino or Francis Ford Coppola. Family, whether biologically programmed for manually collected, is as key to Gray's film as it is to The Deer Hunter The Godfather, films whose opening weddings lend to the start of We Own the Night its languid observation and outsized scope. This director moves faster than the other two, quickly laying out who links up to whom, but he displays the same patience for the minute revelations of character communicated by interaction and shot placement. Gray establishes Bobby as stiffly cordial with his father and brother, Burt (Robert Duvall) and Joe (Mark Wahlberg) Grusinsky, police officers both, but familial with the Russian mobster, Marat, who owns Bobby's club. Gray's next film would be Two Lovers, and this just as easily might have been called Two Families. The care Gray takes in setting up Bobby's complicated relationships with both parties makes the later narrative developments natural outgrowths of a fully realized situation rather than the simple genre mechanics they may initially seem.

Planet of the Apes (1968) vs. Planet of the Apes (2001)

For Spectrum Culture's Re-Make/Re-Model series, I have tried to discuss remakes with artistic credibility in their own right, to show that not every retread is simply a lazy cash-in on an established property. I wanted to find any such merit in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes, which I had not seen since its release when I was 12. But man, was it worth all the disdain I had for the movie even as a tween. Where the original film combines several major subtexts (white slavery panic, nuclear holocaust fears) into solid, simple high-concept film, Burton's has no central point to make, content to just monkey around, as it were. It's a shame, as the production design and prosthetic work are so wonderful that, stylistically, this blows the recent reboot Rise of the Planet of the Apes out of the water. But even that inconsistently plotted movie comes off as a classic next to Burton's movie.

My full piece is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Boogie Nights

Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights revolves around one of the most darkly comic MacGuffins in cinematic history. Like the shark in Jaws, the member of Dirk Diggler at once drives the film and remains unseen, achieving a mythic quality before the payoff. We gauge its size through the reaction shots of those who gaze upon it. Anderson films close-ups of widened eyes and slacked jaws; women (and jealous, insecure men) gaze lustfully at Dirk's diggler, and its symbolic import drives most of the film. Yet just as the shark ultimately didn't live up to the hype -- who can miss that bounce when the shark leaps onto the boat? -- so too does Dirk's member fail to measure up in the end, a flaccid and impotent fossil of the great beast it once was.

Boogie Nights' immediate and most pervasive influence is, of course, Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas: both use highly stylized direction (Anderson's clearly derives from Marty's) to weave an epic tragicomedy of a seedy underworld, GoodFellas with organized crime and Boogie Nights the porn industry. Anderson defines his world with two early, extended tracking shots, one in a discotheque that briefly introduces the large cast and a second, at a pool party, that gives them shape and definition. Both of these tracking shots, as with the magnificent shots of the club and the Copa in GoodFellas, are shimmering and sensual, not so much calling attention to themselves -- as so many extended tracking shots do -- but calling attention to themselves through the narcissism of the world it paints; in both films, the shots justify themselves by reflecting the vanity and self-indulgence of the areas they profile.

At the discotheque works Dirk (né Eddie Adams), a high school dropout who cleans dishes in between working as a male prostitute. His home life recalls Rebel Without a Cause, a harpy-like mother who snaps at her submissive husband; Dirk has to take a bus from Torrance to Reseda to work at the nightclub, a job he could just as easily get closer to home, but then he might not enjoy the benefit of that extra hour each way away from his family. One night, Eddie meets Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), an adult film director who's heard rumors of the particularly gifted washroom boy. Jack invites the lad to his lavish home in the suburbs, a convenient offer when Eddie runs away from home, and before you know it Eddie renames himself Dirk and jumps into his new occupation with vigor.

Toeing the line between absurdity and epic tragedy, Boogie Nights charts the rise and fall of the Me Generation through the highs and lows of the pornography industry, the snowblind cocaine binge of its stars a microcosm for the nation's own drug escapism and the effect of the VHS tape on the business representative of the Reagonomic turn to cold, pragmatic capitalism above all else. Anderson, for his part, understands how ridiculous his story is, and he fills the screen with goofball characters too odd to be anything but believable, such as Don Cheadle as a country music-loving porn star who by day works as a stereo salesman and audiophile; Heather Graham as a young starlet who never takes off her roller skates; John C. Reilly as Reed Rothchild, the former big star who gets gently shoved to the role of the sidekick to make way for Dirk even before the kid enters the business; and William H. Macy as Bill, the cuckolded assistant director, always forced to suffer the indignity of his wife's (porn star Nina Hartley, who ironically enjoyed reportedly the most stable and longest lasting relationship in the business*) public adultery.

Too, Anderson uses his camera with a great deal of wit: he oversaturates the pool party with light, a cheeky emphasis on the sunny appeal of this line of work to the impressionable and, as we learn quickly, childlike Dirk. When Scotty (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the gay boom operator, arrives, Anderson cuts to his POV, framing Dirk in an iris. Naturally, the scenes involving actual porn shoots are hysterical, with the characters woodenly delivering basic dialogue as Jack looks on, brow furrowed in concentration as if a compatriot of the New Hollywood filmmakers taking cinema to bold new territories around the same time. Anderson's stylistic quick-tracks and brightly colored sheen are captivating and immersive even as they are off-putting, gently separating us from the fast-paced, gaudy world he's documenting to allow us to spot the cracks forming before the world of leopard prints and suede crumbles around them.

Working with a cast of Altmanesque proportions, Anderson nevertheless adheres to Scorsese's GoodFellas formula of centering the action on a few characters and rooting the camera in the point of view of the main protagonist. Like Henry Hill, Eddie/Dirk falls into his seedy line of work in adolescence -- Henry starts working for the mob as a boy, while the emotionally stunted, teenage Eddie finds the same familial comfort in adult films -- and rises through the ranks by knowing the game in and out. Dirk even has a primal innocence that Hill never exhibited: in his first shoot, he sheepishly asks if he's doing well, gently asking for encouragement from both his partner in the scene and the people filming. Even as he edges Reed to the sidelines, he develops a deep friendship with the guy. Yet, as Henry before him, Dirk loses himself to cocaine, the white powder affecting his performance and seeding jealous paranoia in his mind, fueling an impotent rage that sends him into a tailspin. Mark Wahlberg, then underwear model and wannabe rapper who played like the New Kids on the Block (of which his brother Donnie was a member) crossed with Vanilla Ice, manages to walk the same tightrope Ray Liotta traversed, between reactive dependency on the factors that affect the character and propulsive acting.

Also key to the story and its thematic purpose is Jack. Played by Burt Reynolds, possibly the icon of '70s populist cinema, Jack represents a perversion of the nostalgia of the decade. As much as he's a seasoned pro, Jack genuinely believes the bullshit he's slinging -- that he's a true filmmaker bringing art to the genre, that he discovers and fosters artistic talent and that he's a father figure to these strung-out, lost children -- and Reynolds makes us like him almost in spite of himself. Perhaps the central performance of the film, however, is Julianne Moore as Amber Waves, the aging porn star who projects the matronly love she's not allowed to give her actual child, separated by her vindictive ex-husband, onto the people in the business, offering a bastion of warmth and support for kids too dumb to realize that she's worse than all of them. She acts out a reverse Oedipal complex with Dirk, her feelings falling somewhere in-between motherly love and sexual lust; a testament to her misplaced sensibilities, she is the one who first offers Dirk cocaine, setting in motion his downfall.

Boogie Nights takes a turn for the worse, symbolically, on the eve of the new decade, with a murder-suicide that grinds the festivities and optimism to a screeching halt. Bill's explosive solution to his wife's infidelity is brief and brutal, ushering in the age of instant gratification: soon, Jack's financier (Robert Ridgely) is busted for possession of child pornography, and his new producer (Philip Baker Hall) curtly tears down Jack's belief in the art of his films, forcing the director to make cheap, to-the-point pictures to be released straight to VHS.

A dark comedy floats over the entire picture, but it dives into the blackest abyss in the third act. Buck (Cheadle) cannot secure a loan for his own stereo outlet, as the bank won't finance a porn star, thus trapping him in the lifestyle. His dream become a harsh nightmare, Jack's cool enthusiasm for his work transforms into bitter workmanship, and both he and Rollergirl unleash their pent-up fury on a derisive amateur performer. Dirk and Reed fall out of the porn business in their addled and attempt to land a record deal, and dire straits force Dirk to return to his life as a male prostitute, leading to an altercation with a group of homophobes.

Brilliantly illustrating the cultural shift from the carefree, self-appraising narcissism and the outright, desperate solipsism of Reagan's '80s is the final extended scene, in which Dirk, Reed and their buddy Todd (Thomas Jane) attempt to scam and rob a drug dealer (Alfred Molina). Molina's apartment condenses the difference between the two decades by replacing the faux-homely, gaudy, sickly warm splendor of '70s decor with icy modern interior design: harsh, white lighting illuminating the slick, mathematically precise furniture, speakers booming soulless synth-pop to match the feel of the decor. One of the most twisted, bizarrely funny sequences I can recall seeing -- and the only sequence in contemporary film that matches the odd tension of one of Quentin Tarantino's elongated scenes -- Todd's plan strikes us as doomed from the start and only gets worse as Molina bandies wildly about the place waving a gun around while a Vietnamese boy in the corner of the living room tosses firecrackers to freak these coked-up robbers out even further. It ends with the sudden, comic brutality of a Tarantino climax, paving the way for a change of heart in Dirk.

Boogie Nights ends with the characters reconciled, several living in Jack's home, the familial undertones of initial interactions now fully developed ties. Yet the comforting ending belies the tragedy of the film: whenever any of these characters interact with the outside world -- as they did in most of the third act -- they are beaten, shot, derided and shunned. Jack will never make another film that will play in a theater; Amber will never gain custody of her child; Dirk and Rollergirl are just two high school dropouts with talents that can be considered old and useless on a yearly basis (surf a few web sites on a virus-protected computer to see an industry that shoehorns its performers into the mature category before they even hit 30**). Anderson is kind enough (though perhaps naïve) not to show any characters ravaged by AIDS, as we so many porn stars during the '80s (among them John Holmes, the basis for Dirk Diggler), but one could scarcely call the ending a happy one. These characters are trapped in their version of Grey Gardens, cut off by a world that sanctimoniously condescends to them even as they increasingly embrace pornography's ethos of gratification and hollow glamor. Even in their glitzy, expensive estate, they're as manipulated and castrated by Reagan's economy and the rise of empty moralism as the poor.



*Research for this film was...interesting.
** Again, very interesting.

The Departed

Martin Scorsese's The Departed is a curious case: in the director's repertoire of masterpieces, classics and just plain good movies, it ranks, narratively and structurally, as one of his weakest. Yet it is also one of his most vibrant and engaging, to the point that I find myself itching to revisit it more than any of his top-tier films, and I adore all of them. In condensing parts of all three of the Infernal Affairs trilogy in one film (though the main focus is only upon the first in the series), the movie becomes bloated and spends no time really analyzing its characters, but Scorsese manages to turn it into an epic tragedy that mostly overcomes its glaring flaws.

Normally, Scorsese's films follow a protagonist so closely that we end up viewing the entire narrative through the character's often demented point of view. This time, however, he charts the paths of two characters, which forces Scorsese to take a more objective approach. He watches the two moles, Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), with rapt curiosity rather than total empathetic involvement, and it's a testament to his mastery of the craft that his camera work does not suffer at all for this drastic shift in style.

Moving outside New York and the Italian scene -- it would have been redundant after GoodFellas so completely charted the Italian mafia -- The Departed instead looks at Boston crime and the influence of the Irish mafia. "I never wanted to be a product of my environment," explains mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) as images of civil turbulence from the '60s flash before our eyes, "I wanted my environment to be a product of me." Costello has taken over the city's crime after driving out black gangs and Italian mafiosos, and the police can't touch him.

He takes young Colin under his wing, and when the lad gets old enough he enrolls in the Police Academy to set himself up as a mole in the department. Meanwhile, Billy joins the force in an attempt to distance himself from his crime-ridden family, only for Capt. Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Sgt. Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) to recruit him to use those ties to infiltrate Costello's organization. They give Costigan enough jail time to make him look legit, then send him back to his family to let him get to work.

Naturally, a film concerning moles primarily concerns identity. The deeper Billy gets into Costello's racket, the more he slowly comes undone under the pressure. When he angrily demands the cops come and bust Costello for any one of the dozens of felonies he's witnessed, Dignam threatens to simply erase his police file and make him just another gangster, and you can see the desperation in DiCaprio's outraged face. Colin begins to dream of a free life when he enters into a relationship with psychiatrist Madolyn Madden (Vera Farmiga), but he's clearly as trapped in Costello's web as Billy. His inability to let people in on his true identity manifests itself when he refuses to let Madolyn display pictures from her childhood when she moves in with him; they only serve to remind him of what he can never have.

There's also a strange paternal bond between Frank and each of the moles. Billy's father and uncle met their demises either directly or indirectly through Costello's actions, and so he places his trust in Bill even when he knows he shouldn't. His relative warmth toward the boy make him more than just the Virgil leading Bill through hell. His bond with Colin is of course even closer, considering he's been nurturing the boy from his adolescence. When Colin contacts Frank, he even calls him Pop so the other cops don't get suspicious.

Scorsese said the film's madcap ending is meant to be a metaphor for the war on terror, which actually makes sense -- surprising, given the over-the-top insanity of the last 20 minutes. The line between cop and criminal disappears in this film when one's identity is muddled, and that could reflect the approval of torture and other atrocities in the name of battling our enemies. The zero-sum bloodbath that closes the film demonstrates that blurring the line to fight the bad guys will destroy us even if we do somehow triumph over the villain.

That final shot, of a rat scurrying across the window, is pathetically obvious, but it's not nearly as bad as some people claim. I've heard people say it ruins the film for them, which baffles me. Still, it shows the cliché in William Monahan's script, which Scorsese successfully underplayed until that moment. Moments like that, combined with the cast's dodgy grasp of the difficult Boston accent and some terrible scenery-chewing from Nicholson, keep The Departed out of the director's upper echelon of work, yet I find myself delighted and completely absorbed by this film.

Where Scorsese's crime dramas are always intimate, tracking one man's ever-unsuccessful attempts to escape the hell of his existence, this dares to be more epic. It brims with the director's signature energy, which was missing in The Aviator and Gangs of New York, though the latter is a better film than this. If nothing else, The Departed demonstrates that, even when working with an under-developed script that reads like a loving Scorsese parody, he can still make something better than most directors could ever hope to craft.

Max Payne

I’m an arrogant man, but I can admit when I’m ignorant. Can someone explain why studios believe that a PG-13 rating will automatically draw more people than an R? I understand it on paper; an R rating means that only those over 16 or with an adult can get in while anyone old enough to ask for a ticket can get into a PG-13 film. What the stated facts do not take into account is how many theaters don’t really care and let anyone looking 17 in for the show. In an industry that shifted completely from word of mouth buzz and sustained box office to a blitzkrieg of ads and a sole focus on opening weekend gross, the potential of an R film to build into a hit is forsaken for a quick buck. If you want a film that sums up the pitfalls of the film industry business model, you could do little better than “Max Payne.”

Based on a popular video game, “Max Payne” is the latest bad adaptation of a medium that is inherently more fun than cinema because you can control it. That is not to say that video games are better, but ask someone if they’d rather play a video game or watch a movie about it, which is essentially like watching someone else play the game the way they want to, and people will overwhelmingly answer the former. Of course, you might have to stop and think for this one, because “Max Payne” the movie bears little resemblance to the game.

Mark Wahlberg stars as the titular hero, a cop traumatized by the murder of his wife and baby who transferred to the Cold Case division to track down possible leads for their killer. As he tracks down killers, he stumbles into a seedy underworld gripped by an ultra-addictive drug that make you see flying demons that may or may not be real. Along the way he meets Mona Sax (Mila Kunis), the arbitrary as-deadly-as-she-is-beautiful killer who wants answers about the grisly death of her sister (Olga Kurylenko). Max was the last one to see her alive, so the two inevitably fight, then team up to fight the bigger foe.

For an action film, there sure is a lot of overlong lead-up. For over an hour, Wahlberg wanders around dark streets with a face expressing only anger and repressed sadness. The film shoots for a noir tone but winds up aimless. He finds a link between a string of thugs and his wife’s killers in the form of a tattoo, which as we all now are limited only to members of secret groups and not freely available for purchase in any parlor anywhere. Mona Sax disappears as quickly as she arrived, to be placed in cold storage for the coming action scenes. Ultimately the hour of exposition is contradictory, misleading (and not in an artistic, suspenseful way), and boring. It’s also unnecessary, since the plot is mostly summed up by a tattoo artist who explains the meaning of the mysterious tats, which in turn tells you all you need to know about the drug.

When the action finally arrives in the last 30 minutes, it is indeed pretty, but it’s unmemorable. Mona shows up just to look good while shooting, and Wahlberg, apparently forcibly restricted to one facial expression for the rest of the film, is suddenly cut loose and all that backed-up emotion comes through in the form of outlandish expressions. John Moore proves to be a hopelessly incompetent director, creating a desaturated world that borders on black and white in a feeble attempt to be a film noir. His action sequences are adequately done but he falls apart in any scene that cannot be rapidly edited; in other words, he cut the film to be emotional but does not know how to capture emotion.

The film is not bad in the sense that you can’t stop thinking how bad it was, it’s bad in the sense that it is totally unmemorable. I sat there, the film ran, then it ended, and I went on my way. The action was moderately entertaining but couldn’t drown out all the boredom that preceded it. Wahlberg, fresh off his role in “The Happening,” the year’s worst film and one of the worst films of recent years, seems hell-bent on killing all his newfound credibility. Kunis, who got her film breakthrough earlier this year in the excellent “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” does what she can, but doesn’t have enough to be good or bad. Wait for the extended cut on DVD, then rent something else instead.