To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2013)

To the Wonder marks the fullest distillation of Terrence Malick’s style even as it violently shakes up the formula like nothing else in his oeuvre from the start. Its opening shots roll out under a blanket of digital snow, lending an immediacy to its central couple’s passionately begun relationship even as it buries some of the romance under heavy image artifacts. Later, back on pristine 35mm stock, Malick and Emmanuel Lubezki bring the same loving aesthetic care to shots of a Sonic Drive-In and a nondescript supermarket that they do to shots of nature. The mundane began to creep into Malick’s frame with The Tree of Life, but even the routines of suburban life were elevated through its overwhelmed child’s perspective, to say nothing of the link of the concrete and uninspiring to the cosmic and ineffable. To the Wonder, however, situates itself firmly within the banality of life, even if the film itself gives over completely to Malick’s cinema of gesture, collage and hushed narration.

The wonder of the title refers to the Merveille of Mont Saint-Michel, the abbey off the coast of Normandy where American Neil (Ben Affleck) and Frenchwoman Marina (Olga Kurylenko) travel after meeting on the former’s European trip. They reach this location not five minutes into the movie, fulfilling the epic ambition of the title through a punny loophole. Where Tree of Life culminated on a beach that elevated reality into the sublime, To the Wonder begins on one, forcing the characters to spend the rest of the film returning to the world. The results make for perhaps Malick’s most harrowing picture, despite laying claim to a corpus in which four of six films contain murder, if not outright war. Violence, pestilence, devastation have always had a place in Malick’s world; Tree of Life even indirectly traced the explosions of The Thin Red Line to a natural history of chaotic destruction and renovation via its intense creation sequence. But To the Wonder rips apart the personal bonds that gives the director’s work its intimacy, pushing farther than the familial strife that tore open holes in his last film and removing (almost) entirely the notes of loving reconciliation and restabilization.

Quantum of Solace

Remember how wonderful “Casino Royale” was, how it added a liberal splash of Jason Bourne to the Bond cocktail and made something that fit in the modern era as well as holding true to the classic character? I don’t think any of us stopped and considered just how lucky they’d been to get away with it. There is perhaps no better proof of this than the latest Bond film, “Quantum of Solace.”

Picking up moments after “Casino” ended, “Quantum” explores Bond’s response to Vesper’s death and uncovers a highly connected worldwide crime syndicate known only as Quantum. Along the way he teams up with a Bolivian spy Camille (Olga Kurylenko) and takes down environmental terrorist and Quantum member Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric). Greene proves to be a big problem to the film; a lot rides on a Bond villain, but Greene strives to be a realistic villain and utterly fails to work in Bond’s world.

The villain’s dastardly scheme? Take control of Bolivia’s water supply, and sell it back to Bolivia for exorbitant prices. Huh, how does that stack up to other Bond villain plots? Destroy almost all life on Earth and rebuild with a tiny group of servants who worship the villain as king (“Moonraker”). Fire an EMP blast on London to cripple the UK and steal billions of British pounds (“Goldeneye”). Seize water and sell it to Bolivia, a country that, according to Wikipedia, has the lowest GDP per capita of any country in South America. That’s like selling food to Ethiopia; not only is it sadistic you’re not going to turn a big profit.

The script was written in part by bane-of-my-existence Paul Haggis, and it reeks of his stench. “Quantum” tries to introduce the real world to Bond’s world, which go together like oil and water. The film gives us a corrupt CIA, one who deals with Quantum for a cut of the profit, and Greene clearly represents the untrustworthiness of business executives. Again, this is Bond. Nobody goes into a Bond film for an allegorical tale or a slice of realism; they go to see a guy blow stuff up and make dark puns about it.

And who let Marc Forster direct this? Forster, the talented director of such films as “Stranger Than Fiction,” “Finding Neverland” and “The Kite Runner,” is undeniably gifted, but has no experience with action. The film genuinely looks like the producers came to Auburn, grabbed me out of my apartment, made me re-watch the Bourne films and said, “Direct the next Bond movie. And make it like Bourne.” The dizzying rapid cuts make it impossible to get any bearings in the action scenes, so they carry no weight. Yes, yes, Chris Nolan had the same problem with Batman, but he at least he threw some long shots into the Batpod sequence.

The film’s only saving grace is its actors. Daniel Craig might be able the first Bond actor to be even remotely comparable to Sean Connery’s defining portrayals, while Kurylenko acquits herself nicely. Amalric, a tremendously gifted French actor who finally got his big break last year with “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” does his best to make Greene work, but the character is too subtle, which just doesn’t fly in Bondworld. Dame Judi Dench is far and away the best M in the franchise’s history, but she’s reduced to a one-note character on the verge of a nervous breakdown when leaks spring up in British and American intelligence. Surely the leader of a bunch of spies is mentally capable of dealing with…spies?

But no matter how hard they try the actors cannot buoy such a shockingly dull film. “Quantum” is not a particularly bad film, but it adheres to the classic Hollywood mantra of sequels: “If it ain’t broke, do your damnedest to break it.” All the components that meshed so perfectly in “Casino Royale” are pushed to the extreme, and the result is a mess every bit as boring as the cartoony CGI-fests that defined Brosnan’s later Bond films. Bond is having an identity crisis: he can’t decide whether he wants to be realistic or escapist, and the film never finds its footing because of it. Some critics complained that this doesn’t feel like a Bond film. That’s the least of its worries.

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.