The Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012)

Let's get a couple of things out of the way. The Avengers opens on such a hollow note that its entire first act struggles to find any kind of footing at all. Trapped between a need for some basic exposition and a total disregard for anyone foolish enough to wade into this film without having seen its multiple-franchise foundations, The Avengers thus has nothing for anyone as it slowly, ever so slowly, brings together its collection of superheroes. And though I've never previously bought the charge that Joss Whedon is a smug writer, I nearly blushed at the self-satisfaction in some early exchanges and setups, so obvious and fan-massaging that their cynicism threatened to divorce me entirely from what I hoped would be Whedon's big break. Maybe all that trash-talking he'd done over the years for those who "misread" or "mishandled" his early film scripts was just a smokescreen for a writer whose considerable gift for television writing simply didn't translate to the more concise storytelling of cinema.

Then, something happened that has not occurred in any of the Marvel films leading up to this blowout: the movie kept getting better. Most of the previous films started with intriguing concepts and approaches before fizzling out in half-baked, perfunctorily executed action romps that served only to set up the chess pieces for this picture. Even Captain America, easily the best of the Marvel Studios franchise starters, dipped a bit in the middle, though it differs from its peers in that it finished strong where movies like Iron Man, Thor and The Incredible Hulk ended on lame notes. But The Avengers swaps the usual Marvel dynamic, moving out of a dull, lazy setup into something clever, well-observed and, ultimately, thrilling. By the time everything fell into place, my laundry list of complaints evaporated in the pure rush of Whedon's ambition.

Iron Man 2

Two years ago, Iron Man became one of the few films with a budget over $100 million that might conceivably be called a "surprise hit." What was most surprising about it is how it pleased damn near everyone -- including this writer -- with barely anything to its credit. It lacked spectacle, had a more difficult time following up on its themes than The Dark Knight and managed to stretch the relatively short origin story of Tony Stark into two hours of one man riffing while something important seemed to be about to happen but never did. Luckily for Jon Favreau and Marvel, that man was Robert Downey Jr.

I have expressed and will continue to express bottomless derision toward the current trend in Hollywood of dancing around weak screenwriting by filtering it through a faux-postmodern prism, retaining all the bad elements but acting as if they are excusable because the writer knows they suck. However, if anyone can force that current of open lethargy into something entertaining, it's Downey. A more captivating and ingratiating sonuvabitch you'll never meet; Downey always has an air about him that suggests he hates the material, regardless of quality, more than the most dismissive Internet troll ever could, yet he routinely makes good films better and weaker ones memorable. On the rare occasion that he plays a character whose excesses build beyond his control, as he did early in his career in Less Than Zero and recently in Zodiac, the actor can be an emotionally devastating specter of a fallen man.

The first Iron Man never called for that side of Downey's acting prowess and contented itself simply with unleashing his smarmy detachment upon the world in a glorious burst of one-liners that made the film the best comedy of the summer to make up for its often tedious structure. Its sequel, however, could have benefited from a moment or two of reflection, when Downey's facade remains but cracks irreparably to show the raging fear and loathing within. Instead, it chooses to cut off its fleeting severity with comic relief, if not a desperate cut to another location as if literally running away from context. Iron Man 2 suggests that the power source Tony Stark built to save his life might actually be killing him in another way, and Stark's main course of action is to just cover this up from everyone to appear strong, a fitting metaphor for a film that attempts to posit every stereotypically "American" cinematic value through its obscenely wealthy businessman-hero.

Yes, it's going to be that kind of a review, but, in fairness, the Iron Man series is currently the most openly political comic book film franchise to hit theaters. Its hero found his calling after being kidnapped by Arab insurgents and discovering that the weapons his company designed passed into enemy hands. This brought about a personal epiphany and a question about the possibility of only supplying one party in a modern, global network, which was almost immediately discarded to reconstitute the film as nothing more than a contrast between a grating but moral businessman and the evil, greedy corporate weasel who actively sold products to America's enemies. Stark defeated this man and went straight to a hearing where he brazenly revealed his secret identity to the world.

Iron Man 2 picks up right where its predecessor left off, and the best that can be said for this turn of events is that the film does at last give us a comic book hero who not only doesn't doubt his powers or capacity when the sequel comes around; rather, he's so psyched that he tells everyone. Perhaps if Favreau had followed that line, a truly original one in the over-exposed yet still young and potential-filled field of comic book movies, Iron Man 2 might have made for interesting and fresh viewing. But the political aspect returns, introducing bigger issues yet somehow compressing them into even broader oversimplifications.

"I have successfully privatized world peace," he crows in a Senate committee hearing on the ownership of the Iron Man suit, a statement that horrifically elicits wild cheering from the crowd as Stark's chief critic, Senator Stern (Garry Shandling) is reduced to openly swearing in impotent rage at his nemesis. One sympathizes; the brash and arrogant Tony Stark that made for such a cheeky twist in the first film is gone, replaced by a whirling maelstrom of narcissism. Stark's self-love has morphed into outright solipsism, forcing the audience to follow around a character who does not want us to identify with him, who would not even let us wax one of the many cars he rarely drives.

With his pencil-thin mustache, hands-on approach to his inventions, rampant womanizing and erratic behavior terms "eccentricity" due to personal wealth and social standing, Tony Stark is most clearly modeled upon infamous playboy/basket case Howard Hughes, who also defied governmental authority and got away with it because of his wealth. But Hughes, despicable and hateful little man that he was, has an air of tragedy that Tony lacks.

Perhaps that's just a result of the times changing. Hughes' tics and obsessions would raise eyebrows today, but a half-century ago they were outlandishly scandalous. Stark, on the other hand, enjoys a world filled with vacuous, flash-hungry millennials so inundated with Internet gossip and so dumbed-down by, well, movies like this that the cocky antics of this incorrigible billionaire are perceived as cool. "Blow something up!" yells one young man from the nether-region of off-screen ADR when Tony makes a grandiose entry to an expo in the suit, the man in question having clearly fallen for Iron Man during some filmed raid of a Middle Eastern locale. For these fictional people, the act of seeing something on video instantly renders it entertainment in the same way our own intermittent carpet-bombing of Baghdad across the decades looks like a video game.

In this sense, Iron Man 2 offers the audience a strange opportunity to watch itself watching the film, a potentially metaphysical commentary on the nature of blockbusters in altering our sensitivity to violence and our acceptance of those "Amurican" values of isolationism as strident individualism and physical strength (this theory is inherently flawed, however, when you factor in Stark's hyper-intelligence and the opposition with which the people who most ardently embrace such hawkish nonsense as patriotism typically view the highly educated). I say "potentially," of course, because Favreau wants nothing less than to follow up on these sociopolitical tendrils, clearly willing as he is to present them so nakedly.

And so, Tony is permitted to live his life of staggering hypocrisy, cutting weapons development from Stark Industries (which existed almost exclusively to make weapons) while keeping the most advanced and dangerous weapon, whether he admits it's one or not, in the world for himself. When someone like Senator Stern, who is left without party affiliation, points this out, he is shamed not only within the film by Stark and his blinding (perhaps literally, given what he can get away with) charisma but outside of it by the director, who films Shandling in so unflattering a light you'll wish he'd directed that episode of The Larry Sanders Show he guested on, if not all of them. As it happened in the far more abhorrent -- aesthetically, structurally and morally -- Transformers 2, the sole voice of reason is presented as a nasally, pernicious genital wart, a bureaucratic farce who has the audacity to stand in the way between us and shit getting blown up. What an asshole.

Fine, so Jon Favreau maybe isn't the person to iron out (get it?) the political implications of Iron Man, though perhaps they should find someone who is since the hero is a conflicted weapons dealer and that brings with it political ramifications. But let's stop beating this horse for a while when so many more horses have been generously donated by Stark Industries for glue production. Perhaps I should get into the plot soon.

Oh, but that'll just make me angrier. Iron Man 2 pairs Tony against Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke), who builds his own arc reactor from blueprints his father made when he was the partner of Tony's father, Howard. Justin Theroux reworked Ivan and his father, Anton, from Anton's roots in the comics as the Crimson Dynamo into a much more inherently interesting story. Whiplash, originally a Stark employee turned rogue, is now the son of the scientist Tony's father had deported and discredited, giving him a link to the hero that could prove fruitful. Further, the two make for terrific foils: both are the sons of scientific geniuses, partners even. Both of those fathers were emotionally distant, Howard from his work (which, as we learn, was more far-reaching than his son ever knew) and Anton from his alcoholic bitterness; the difference, of course, is that Tony grew up in the lap of luxury while Ivan must get by with DIY experiments.

That too, flies out the window as quickly it appears, leaving Rourke to indulge his wackiest indulgences, chief among them a strange relationship with a parakeet. Supposedly he caused so much stress in production that Favreau changed the film to bar Rourke from returning in a future installment, but perhaps the actor just got bored with having to sit around all day to drawl his 12 lines in a thick Russian accent. You might go a little stir-crazy too.

He's lucky to have any lines at all, though, considering just how much they managed to somehow cram more words into Downey's mouth. Much as the limp-fisted political content riles, it cannot compare to Iron Man 2's crucial flaw: too much of a good thing. Downey spit out self-aggrandizing lines at a blinding pace in the first film, and the one-liners fly so fast here that most are lost in the shuffle. He and Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow, who looks so confused and frustrated by how quickly everything is moving you almost pity her) lock themselves into so many overlapping arguments that Altman might be invoked had the layered dialogue been remotely understandable or there for any reason other than to stuff in as many jokes as possible. As I watched Iron Man 2, I thought less of The Dark Knight, which for all its flaws is certainly still the best comic book film, and more of the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels. Both franchises feature an offbeat actor playing a part practically created for him, allowing for a high-comic symbiosis that, in the case of the earlier film, made us forget we were watching a movie about a damn theme park attraction and, in Iron Man, effortlessly propelled a film without much narrative thrust. But but franchises oversold their hot ticket with the successors, now actively trying to capture what had just been a harmonic tuning until the quirky-but-natural performances feel processed and forced.

Pepper gets a storyline of her own as Tony's pick as replacement for CEO of Stark Industries, though we only get to see her when she edges into Tony's periphery, when she's spending more time still running PR for Tony than running the business she was so happy to inherit. Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) also shows up to discuss S.H.I.E.L.D. operations with Tony, and a new assistant named Natalie (Scarlett Johansson) factors into Tony's life as well. These are all tiny threads in a tapestry that was never woven together, taking away time from Tony's conundrum with his arc reactor, his conflict with Whiplash and his ongoing debate with the United States government while never progressing on their own terms. Like just about every other sequel, Iron Man 2 simply decides to be bigger without being better, barely leaving time for any action scenes and spending more time ogling computer-animated images of how computers might one day...animate images than it does with any character.

Surprisingly, the worst element of the film, rival weapons dealer Justin Hammer, is actually the most enjoyable, thanks to a giddy performance by Sam Rockwell. To make Tony Stark look well-adjusted, they had to turn Hammer into a joke of a character, a sniveling incompetent who receives government funding when Stark drops out of the weapons game -- and why isn't military-industrial collusion a focus of any amount of concern in these films? But Rockwell owns the part, parlaying the greasy charm he brings to his vilest characters into a faux-suave schmoozer who can barely keep ahead of his own uselessness as an inventor. His interplay with Rourke, all motor-mouthed schmoozing and awkward capitulation in the face of Ivan's tacit stonewalling, is hilarious, and possibly not at all faked if Rockwell and the others had to contend with Rourke's infamous preening and petulance.

Indeed, I almost, almost, want to give Iron Man 2 a pass simply because it raises the mainstream profile of three of my favorite living actors. It cements the "don't call them comebacks" of Rourke and Downey and offers Sam Rockwell his most visible job yet, perhaps paving the way for him to unleash the talent he's been refining just off the beaten path for a few years now in works like Snow Angels, Choke and Moon upon the mainstream world. Even Lt. Col. James Rhodes gets an upgrade, replacing Terrence Howard with Don Cheadle over money hassles.

And yet, no one has enough time to make a real impression, except Downey, who frankly has too much. Even if they did, they could never fully distract from the film's glaring weaknesses. If the first Iron Man managed to work without a propulsive plot, its sequel introduces so many storylines that it never moves into the action extravaganza it thinks it is. That's actually the most fascinating trait of these films: both times this franchise has tricked people into this its spare moments of action somehow fill most of the film's length, even though more time is spent on the advanced computers in Stark's home than with the Iron Man in battle. This deception remains a curious psych-out that could possibly save studios a great deal of money on their blockbusters if anyone could work out how Favreau pulls it off, if he is even consciously aware of the effect at all. But with the Stark levels constantly in the red, the lack of releasing spectacle is more evident here, and Iron Man 2 often wobbles between its belief in its own cool and the reality of its inaction. Frankly, I knew I was in trouble when Tony's first action in the film, flying ostentatiously into a stadium as fireworks explode and barely-dressed women dance around him, only to then immediately launch into a speech about changing the way the world gets energy. That's like setting off Roman Candles before you make a goddamn time share pitch. In that one ludicrous moment is the whole film: an idiotic distraction that wants to flirt with seriousness but has commitment issues.

I cannot say that Iron Man 2 is everything wrong with mainstream American cinema and our self-perception, not with Transformers 2 bumbling around the universe. It lacks the overt racism of Bay's disaster (and, truth be told, the first Iron Man, with its pathetic scenes of wish-fulfillment concerning the War on Terror), as well as the sexism, fashioning Natalie Rushman into a capable, strong fighter and letting Pepper be reasonable without being lambasted for it the way Stern is. Too, Favreau's direction is not quite sterling, but he has a better sense of staging than Michael Bay; aesthetically, Iron Man 2 is at worst passively unengaging, while Bay's style is far more offensively gauche and incompetent.

Yet the film still puts forward in laziness and unexplored themes what Transformers 2 actively advocated in its jingoistic ejaculation. Stark, already modeled for a past mogul, is an open throwback to '80s-era business excess, a time when corporate corruption was no less abhorrent but at least had a popular face under the condoned, even lauded hedonism of the wealthy under Reagan. We are made to believe that Tony, who does not wish to answer to the federal government but displays lip-service loyalty to America, to be the unequivocally "good" guy while people like Obadiah Stane and Justin Hammer, who will take their products where there is profit to be made, as evil. Both sides are ludicrously rich and filled with a sense of entitlement, but an outdated sense of patriotism absolves Tony. Yet one cannot look at the hypocritical vilification of Hammer or Stane without thinking of some of the current doublespeak involving Big Business by those beholden to it, the most recent example being the fiasco in the Gulf. Harebrained opportunists like Sarah Palin use the incident to call for an end to foreign oil, ignoring (or ignorant of) the impossibility of "domestic oil" when a company like, you know, British Petroleum is the one sucking up the black gold from our waters and land. Hammer and Stane should represent the insidiousness of globalization in relation to corporate crime and lawlessness, but instead they get to be easy targets that represent "bad business" while Tony gets to be the Reaganite star child without full reproach. For God's sake, the villain is even Russian, a nationality once again becoming our cinematic enemies either out of fear of Islamist reprisal or the continued desire to just return to simpler times when we just had to worry about a thermonuclear device instantly vaporizing us instead of all this car-bomb suspicion.

I certainly don't think, of course, that Favreau is intentionally putting forward this haltingly pro-unchecked capitalist (so long as those capitalists use some of their wealth to buy American flags) sentiment, but there's no way he didn't acknowledge some of the glaring political content, considering how much he undercuts personal insight to call more attention to senators and corrupt businessmen. What he is most guilty of is the same laziness the rest of America feels toward our current crisis: no one wants to fix the problem, only to return to a time when the problem wasn't noticeable.

We'd still like to thumb our noses at the problem though, and Iron Man 2 comes with a smugness common to the state of public perception at the moment, in which everyone would like to look down on everything, preferably without having to do anything so inconvenient as "research" or "reading." The film apathetically taps into our hatred of politicians, condescension and latently xenophobic rejection of downtrodden foreigners and our desire to continue the worship of money after its high priests have been exposed as rapacious, fraudulent thieves. Ultimately, Iron Man 2 wants nothing more than to turn us into that guy in the crowd, placed in the middle of an expo promoting technological advancement and the possibilities of scientific growth in a country that has vilified the educated and the fact-based in praise of the blinded faithful, unable to think of anything other than how cool it would be to see something blow up.

Sherlock Holmes

Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes has and likely will continue to receive attention -- positive, negative, thoughtful and juvenile -- concerning the transparency of its "hinted" homosexual bond between Sherlock Holmes and his trusty friend Dr. Watson. Indeed, they're so inseparable that one might be forgiven for assuming that Guy Ritchie had adapted the work of Sir Arthur Conan Bro-yle. Christ, is this really how I've decided to usher in the new year of this blog? With asinine puns that would make a five-year-old groan? I deeply apologize ladies and gentlemen; if I have offended one or all of my five regular readers I can only assure you that it shan't happen again.

Where were we? Ah yes, Guy Ritchie's action-flick re-imagining of Sherlock Holmes. Well, perhaps it's not as extreme a makeover as some believe: in Doyle's stories, Holmes knew the street fighting techniques Robert Downey Jr. uses every few minutes to knock what few teeth haven't already rotted off out of the mouths of cockney thugs. Downey is, even to this admitted fanboy, astounding in the role of Holmes: one could be forgiven for cynically viewing Downey's casting as proof that producers will seemingly never fund a big-budget British action feature without an American star for insurance, but that ignores both Downey's tenuous, recently founded position as a bankable star and his incandescent performance as the English Charlie Chaplin. Downey captures the full range of the character, Holmes' wit, infinitely broad range of knowledge and powers of deduction.

Furthermore, the world Ritchie builds around Downey and his fantastic performance is an exemplary depiction of Victorian England, flawless in its deep, grimy flaws. The skies maintain a constant gray formed from that terrible mention of London's rainy climate and the pollution of the Industrial Revolution; stagnant rainwater forms into puddles everywhere, but this London is so dull that the water can barely reflect it. A moderate steampunk influence permeates this world, with spring-loaded Derringers and an electric contraption that proves central to a climactic setpiece.

Downey and the background are the two best aspects of the film, but both are outrageously, inexplicably truncated, set aside in a movie that belongs to them in favor of...what, exactly? Certainly not the intricacies of the plot, involving the cultish occupations of one Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong, who is now apparently contractually obligated to be a villain in any movie that calls for a British antagonist), a Member of Parliament caught sacrificing young virgins (oy) by Holmes and hanged by the courts. He's pronounced dead -- by none other than Dr. Watson (Jude Law, hopefully staging a comeback after slipping from guaranteed bankability to critical and commercial indifference in the last few years) -- but returns from the grave and continues to kill.

The problem with this setup is that it clearly defines the villain in a "whodunit" movie, which might not have been a detriment had Ritchie streamlined the picture. Yet Sherlock Holmes drones on for two hours with barely enough material to fill a 70-minute film: Law has nothing to do but pout as Watson and occasionally lend a hand in a fight, a streetwise version of Law's performance as Lord Alfred Douglas in Wilde. Various interesting characteristics dash fleetingly across the screen -- a gambling problem, the question of his medical acumen in pronouncing a man dead who "returned" from the grave, the tension he suffers from his fiancée and Holmes' rivalry -- but they vanish as soon as they appear, titillating the audience with the promise of three-dimensionality before firmly rooting Watson as nothing more than the straight man (so to speak) for Holmes. Holmes himself has few opportunities to prove his intelligence, never letting us in on a single aspect of his thought process during the main investigation and demonstrating his deductive reasoning in one or two tacked-on scenes inserted to assure the audience that he's a genius; had the writers cut out these scenes -- all of them unimportant and at best barely relevant to the story -- and simply allowed Holmes to deduce relevant clues while still retaining the ultimate mystery until the end, Sherlock Holmes might have been as entertaining as it thinks it is.

And what of that latent homosexuality between Holmes and Watson? Does it provide anything other than nervous titters for gently homophobic crowds? I can think of no reason why Holmes, the most brilliant man in Britain, would revert to the mindset of a five-year-old when faced with the prospect of his dear friend getting engaged. He's above frat-boy sexism, thus leaving a gay crush as the only reasonable explanation, but Ritchie softens this by providing Holmes a romantic foil with Irene Alder (Rachel McAdams), one of only two characters (along with Moriarty) who could successfully match wits with Sherlock Holmes. By injecting her into the film primarily to offset complaints by purists and homophobes, however, Ritchie cheapens the character, along with Holmes: while Downey has a firm grasp on the character, Ritchie and the writers don't, and the only reason Irene -- seen often at the mercy of a mysterious employer -- ever pulls a fast one on Holmes is because he is occasionally forced to act like an idiot for the sake of convenience.

Sherlock Holmes is fun enough, I suppose, and there are far worse ways I could have spent my New Year's midnight screening (some people likely are catching up on the awards bait, so I imagine at least a few poor souls watched Precious). There are a few sly tidbits here and there, such as a cheeky Victorian take on someone hearing a creepy noise then continuing to bathe without a care; the cast largely acquits themselves nicely, and fans of Mike Leigh's black-lighthearted comedy Happy-Go-Lucky should be pleased to see the splendid Eddie Marsan as the questionably competent Inspector Lestrade. It's also wonderful to see Robert Downey, Jr. cleaned up and gaining traction at last in Hollywood as the lead of two concurrent franchises. Long may he reign. But the entire structure of Sherlock Holmes is just off: Holmes doesn't detail any clue until the very end, after an action setpiece that renders further discussion moot and offers only a "oh that's how they did it" montage that would fit better in a CSI episode than a cleverly constructed Holmes tale. By the time it finally gets around to the plot, no one cares, and that's more or less Sherlock Holmes in a nutshell.

Natural Born Killers

Before a young, hyperactive video clerk by the name of Quentin Tarantino became, for better or worse, the icon of American independent cinema in the '90s, he toted around a couple of scripts around Hollywood hoping to direct them but at the very least looking to sell one. He managed, of course, to hold onto Reservoir Dogs for himself, his script for True Romance was optioned and eventually given to Tony Scott. His other screenplay, though, is what set the ball rolling for QT in the first place. Tarantino shopped the screenplay for Natural Born Killers around Hollywood in '91, caused a bit of a stir that helped him secure the capital for Reservoir Dogs, then he set aside the script as an immature work full of good ideas and dialogue but bursting with unfulfilled potential -- and he's very much right; his NBK starts incredibly but it loses steam in the second half.

Again, this was before the persona known as "QT" hit big, so this display of humility did not elicit the proper amount of gravity for Warner Bros., who bought the thing anyway and gave it to Oliver Stone. Now, if Tony Scott was a fun fit for Tarantino, Oliver Stone was a sign from God that this kid was going to ride Fortune's wheel to the top. You can argue for a certain degree of subtlety in Tarantino's scripts -- the utter genius of the "Eggplant" scene in True Romance, how Inglourious Basterds, for all its "badassery," shows a group of characters consumed by their quest for revenge, not validated by it -- but even the most cynical of haters would admit that QT is Voltaire compared to Oliver Stone. Indeed, even Tarantino's script was a bit too satirical and not not direct enough, so Stone and his writers kept most of the dialogue and reworked the story around it. The original writer disowned it, but eventually he divorced himself from his personal feelings on the tampering and admitted an admiration for Stone's choices.

That seems to be the appropriate response to this movie, regardless of how you feel about it: at least some level of admiration for it. Stone was coming off the more low-profile Heaven & Earth at the time, but he was still the man who was enjoying one of the most notable runs of any director of the last 25 years: Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK. It was Stone's world, and we all just lived in it. By the time this story of sensationalized mass murderers entered post-production, the country had been positively inundated with ghastly reflections of this erstwhile piece of satire: O.J. Simpson, the Menendez brothers, hell, even Tanya Harding. That Stone could put out this damning piece of social commentary, particularly one so openly avant-garde, deserves recognition in its own right.

For my money, it deserves the attention. In some respects, no other American film of the decade was as important. Just as America's fascination with crime and violence began to openly assert itself, Stone's Killers wasn't so much a splash of cold water to the face as a sledgehammer. Its dizzying use of edits, different film stocks, color tinting and host of other tricks (including animation and flickering between images as if changing channels) reflect the stupefying disorientation of television. Much of the film's violence, so virulently debated and decried, is presented as captured footage or dramatic reenactments of Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis) Knox's crimes, all of which are just as violent and exploitative as the moments where we witness them in real time.

The presentation of the film as television is a retooling of Tarantino's original verité-like documentary footage, which he abandoned in the second half anyway. Stone's choice is funnier and more relevant, and it allows him to inject some of the most ingenious flourishes of his career. The original screenplay, centered on media personality Wayne Gale (Robert Downey, Jr.) and gave little background to the serial killers, which Stone rectified by making the warped lovebirds the full focus; his framing of Mallory's abusive childhood as an "aw-shucks" sitcom is possibly the singly most brilliant thing he's ever done. With Rodney Dangerfield playing the physically and sexually abusive father and an accompaniment of canned laughter, its easy to fall into the rhythm of a typical sitcom, until you realize that Dangerfield's punchlines are horrific descriptions of rape and beatings, all the more frightening in how Stone juxtaposes them with the laugh track, underlining how sitcoms in general milk laughs from some form of abuse and positing that violence is so ingrained in our culture that we find it inoffensively funny (how many of all the actions films made each year feature some death played for laughs?).

Mickey has his own childhood demons, and in this way Stone presents these characters as products of a violent society that matures into freewheeling madness just as Mickey and Mallory mature into their own. As such, society venerates them, chiefly through Wayne Gale, a Geraldo Rivera with Robin Leach's accent, whose program American Maniacs has never been more popular. His appearance is broadly satiric in the first half, where Gale plays in the background of Mickey and Mallory's rampage, gently inciting the public into accepting these two as heroes of some sort.

The third act, which actually lasts half the movie, takes place in prison following Mickey and Mallory's capture -- hilariously, Stone set their shootout with the cops to the Carmina Burana, further emphasizing it as a piece of operatic television. Many point to the second half as a letdown following the impressionistic, madcap murder spree, but just as Full Metal Jacket before it, Natural Born Killers needs the sudden shift in gear to flesh out its striking opening into a concrete message. Moving the pair to prison allows a juxtaposition against two cops: Detective Jack Scagnetti (Tom Sizemore), a warped, misogynistic sadist obsessed with murderers after Charles Whitman shot his mother during his rampage at the University of Texas; and Dwight McClusky (Tommy Lee Jones), an equally brutal warden who deals with the increasing overpopulation of his prison with violent offenders by physically asserting himself over those who dare step out of line. Scagnetti attempts to force himself on Mallory, who responds to his offer of a cigarette by stomping it out with her bare foot. McClusky, unlike the showboat Scagnetti, doesn't like the publicity coming his way and wants Mickey and Mallory simply and quietly killed. Yet he clearly works on his image, and he's too busy preening his devilish look to contemplate the full truth of his statement, "This place isn't a prison; it's a time bomb."

Gale's interview with Mickey is appropriately histrionic (on the presenter's part, at least), but the killer's cold rationality for his actions sparks a riot. Suddenly, television's role as a passive propagandist becomes an active character as Gale's ever-dwindling crew is forced to follow Mickey as he rescues Mallory and navigates through the horrific bloodbath that is the direct result of television. Up until this point, Natural Born Killers does not fully qualify as satire, as Stone leaps so fervently into the heart of the beast that the film's extreme violence is largely inseparable from the sort that it seeks to condemn. At last, though, it emerges as a piece of genius, as Gale is so consumed in his own hype that he too begins to gun down prison guards in a frenzy. As TV destroys itself in rapid montage, Mickey and Mallory emerge the evolved "natural born killers," the idols of a world that has finally come to celebrate its evil side, and they re-establish the "purity" of violence by killing the representative of that which turned it into a a product.

People always like to say of performances they love, even in films they might dislike, "Oh, if so-and-so wasn't in it the movie wouldn't have been half as good." I don't know why people say this, as it is so asinine as to warrant nothing but mockery -- The Godfather wouldn't be the same without Al Pacino; is it a bad film?. However the casting of Woody Harrelson, then known (fittingly, given the context of the film) only as dopey Woody from Cheers, and Juliette Lewis as two psychotic yet perversely endearing serial killers should remain an example until the end of cinema as an example of absolutely perfect casting. Downey, Sizemore and Jones also give incredible performances, all of them wildly exaggerated yet perfectly plausible in this disgusting world. But the real star here is Stone, whose techniques are utterly distracting, yet intentionally so. By the end of the film's two hours, he's destroyed the exploitative medium of television through sheer sensory overload, and his final blow is to the audience itself, as he ends with channel surfing through the sensationalizes murder trials of the day. In a career distinguished by visual inventiveness, even mastery, Natural Born Killers stands as his finest technical achievement. Upon seeing it a second time, I'm tempted to call it his greatest film, period; has any other mainstream film so trashed our cultural acceptance, even infatuation, with violence without resorting to preaching?

Bowfinger

At the top of his game, there's no one quite like Steve Martin. A combination of ham-handed vaudevillian and ironic commentator, he makes straight man roles inherently loopy and can deliver the zaniest dialogue with a stone face. Who else could deliver the overused "and by X I mean Y" joke construct and make it seem as if he'd just invented it? Apart from Andy Kaufman, no other modern comedian could lay such a concrete claim to being a "song and dance man," given his work in front of and behind the camera as well as forays into banjo playing. Starting in the late '80s Martin reinvented his comic persona to take on a more contemplative and satiric bent, and Bowfinger is the capper of his second era, the one that gave us hits like Parenthood and the classics Planes, Trains and Automobiles and L.A. Story.

Like L.A. Story, Bowfinger takes aim at life in Los Angeles, but Martin this time focuses more on Hollywood and the craft of filmmaking than the all-encompassing feeling of his masterpiece. He plays Bobby Bowfinger, a middle-aged cinephile who's devoted his life to running a production company and has only an empty shell of one to show for it. He prevents his actress friend from getting work because he's always convinced that the right script is just about to fall in his lap, and the only person he ever confides in is a young camera operator named Dave (Jamie Kennedy). Bowfinger's been content to string along the small band of denied dreamers for years, but he finally sees the writing on the wall as he approaches his 50th birthday -- in true Martin style, he says that, at 49, he can still pass for 44, well, 41. Well, 38, but at 50 you're done -- and he concentrates on getting just one picture done before Hollywood declares him dead.

So, when his accountant hands him a script entitled Chubby Rain, about aliens who invade Earth via raindrops, he leaps into action. Bowfinger gives a moving speech to Dave about saving up a dollar a week since he was 10 to make a film someday, and he triumphantly opens a box full of singles and announces that he has a whopping $2,184 from his diligence. That's the first big laugh of the film, and Martin kicks things into high gear at this point, highlighting this goofy band of misfits as they scramble to make a film.

Amazingly, for all its silliness and off-kilter charm, every little piece of Martin's script works. Heather Graham shows up as a sweet Midwestern gal who dreams of being in the movies, but as soon as she lands a part in the picture she demonstrates a keen grasp on sexual politics: she hangs off of Dave and Afrim the accountant until she makes her way to Bowfinger himself. She even displays a willingness to "switch teams" to get ahead (a commentary on Martin's brief relationship with Anne Heche, perhaps?). Bowfinger uses Dave's occupation as a studio-employed cameraman to nick equipment for free, much to Dave's constant fear. Pent up for years, possibly decades, waiting for Bobby to make a film to liberate her, Carol hysterically falls into every bad acting trope in the book, be it a terrible and wholly unsolicited British accent or a sudden case of ego.

Martin weathers everything he throws at his sadsack with adroit timing. Chubby Rain takes the term "guerrilla filmmaking" to new levels, as Bowfinger pulls up to streets in L.A., unloads his crew and tries to get in a few takes before the cops show up looking for a permit. In a brilliant piece of Hollywood satire, a cop pulls up to check their paperwork before it's even fully apparent that they're there to shoot something, only for Martin to offer the officer a role instead. When he discovers that Daisy's love extends only as far as the next rung on the social ladder, he confronts her over her infidelity. "So?" she asks in a tone that betrays how meaningless sex and sexual partners are to her, and Martin takes only enough time to run his eyes up and down Graham's figure before replying, "You know, I never thought of it that way."

As good as Martin is, though, it's Eddie Murphy who makes the movie, putting in his second finest performance(s) after The Nutty Professor. He plays Kit Ramsey, the most bankable movie star in Hollywood but also the victim of mental instability and paranoia. Imagine then his utter terror when Bowfinger, who needs Ramsey to sell his film to a distributor (Robert Downey, Jr.) but doesn't have remotely the money needed to pay Ramsey's rate, simply decides to film the actor without his knowledge, much less consent. Bowfinger convinces his actors that Ramsey is simply method acting, so they run up to him on the street and recite their lines concerning alien invasions, or they trigger squibs and other gory effects to seemingly melt before his eyes. Murphy fleshes out Ramsey with very little screen time, establishing him first as an egomaniac with a persecution complex -- when we meet him, he's berating his agent after searching for the letter 'k' in the script he received, dividing it by three, and shouting that "KKK" appears exactly 486 times in the pages -- and then as the paranoid mess comforted by Scientology knockoff MindHead.

The flip side of Murphy's performance is that of Jiff, Kit's brother and a dead ringer for the mega star. Where Kit is handsome and beloved by all, Jiff works oddjobs, can't see at all without his dorky glasses and appears to have sported braces since his baby teeth fell out. A completely one-dimensional character, Jiff nevertheless works because of how deeply Murphy commits to this weirdo. All Jiff wants to do is "real" work, so he agrees to be an assistant for Bowfinger to fetch coffee and the like, but naturally the producer exploits Jiff's resemblance to his brother and uses him as a body and stunt double. In the film's best comedic sequence, Bowfinger has Kiff run across an L.A. freeway as an action scene. Thanks to Frank Oz's skillful direction, which captures the cars only as blurs, I felt genuine terror watching Jiff try to make his way across eight lanes of traffic -- twice of course; you always need retakes -- even, as Martin points out, the cars are driven by professionals.

In some ways, Bowfinger is as revealing about the ins-and-outs of the industry as The Player: Martin's character believes he has a winner in Afrim's script simply because it ends with the catchphrase, "Gotcha, suckers," but Downey's executive gives Bowfinger his shot solely because he likes the phrase. In Ramsey's first rant, he rails against black people never getting any good catchphrases, as they go to Schwarzenegger, Stallone, or other white stars. Graham's character is a manipulative succubus who just might make it one day because of her shrewdness and certainly not her talent. But it's also a story of hope, one that vindicates these insane people through the sensation of making art (or whatever the hell it is you'd call Chubby Rain). These two aspects never fully gel for, as with all things to come from Steve Martin, you can never find solid ground because he never lets on what is sincere and what is simply an ironic ruse. Nevertheless, Bowfinger is a triumph, if not altogether great, about the joys of filmmaking, ultimately every bit as earnest as Tim Burton's Ed Wood and just as concerned with prying the beauty from B-movie absurdity. It's not the best Hollywood movie out there, but it's one of them, and it's lighthearted enough to be enjoyed on a rainy Sunday or a film class.

The Soloist

After months in mysterious limbo, Joe Wright’s latest opus, “The Soloist,” finally hits theaters four months after it could win the awards for which it was clearly designed. So, the story of Nathaniel Anthony Ayers Jr. must wade out into the dangerous waters of spring cinema, the final dumping of pictures with dubious prospects before the summer rolls around to start blowing things up. After watching the film, I now understand the delay.

The story, of course, is based on Los Angeles Times reporter Steve Lopez’s attempts to rehabilitate a former Julliard undergraduate whom he finds playing in a park in Los Angeles. Unlike other panhandlers, Nathaniel plays not for change but simply for the music. Lopez, desperate for a story, decides to write a column on the man, and soon he’s got an ongoing hit. Robert Downey Jr. plays Lopez with a fine mixture of selfish egoism and wracked emotion, giving us a man who genuinely cares for Nathaniel and wants to help but also doesn’t mind the fan mail that comes his way.

Lopez has a hell of an uphill struggle: Nathaniel, a schizophrenic, speaks in hyperspeed sentences that leap from Beethoven to God to Lopez himself and then really jump off the diving board. The he only thing he can focus on is music, and when he plays the world melts away. When Lopez’s columns begin to circulate, the conductor of the L.A. Philharmonic invites Ayers to a performance, where the screen suddenly cuts to bright, colored lights, suggesting Nathaniel has synesthesia, a condition that allows people to “see” music.

Jamie Foxx complements Downey’s straight man perfectly; rather than “play up” Ayers’ mental illness, he gives a rare believable performance of a mentally challenged person. In every scene his eyes dart back and forth, as if ensuring he could make a run for it at any moment. When he snaps he’s truly frightening, but you can’t help but love the guy when he picks up an instrument and a bow. And even though a number of his lines are clearly played for easy laughs, Foxx generally steers clear of exploiting his character. If Foxx was just in it for the Oscar, he at least gave us a terrific performance to earn it.

So if the film hinges entirely on Downey and Foxx, who are both excellent, what’s the problem? Well, as per usual with a Joe Wright film, the fault lies behind the lens. Wright, a technically gifted director, has yet to figure out how to tastefully apply his techniques to the subjects he tackles. Technical flair can certainly spice up even the most Oscar-baiting of dramas, but you have to make it work with the material; it’s the difference, say, between Paul Thomas Anderson in “There Will Be Blood” and Paul Thomas Anderson in “Magnolia.”

To his credit, this is the first film where Wright puts his skill to good use, what with his attempts to visualize what really goes on in Nathaniel’s mind. He jump cuts when Ayers begins to hallucinate, filling the speakers with white noise and sinister whisperings of mocking voices. But, like Ayers’ thought process, the film lacks any focus: is it a commentary on the importance of friendship? On how he can’t change people and how we define others without truly seeing them? How the endless possibilities of music? I don’t know, and neither, I suspect, does the writer. It turns what had been a promising feature into a meandering, jumbled mess with a cheaply sentimental ending that undermines the sensitivity and maturity that preceded it. Heck, Wright can’t even settle on a point of view: it’s Lopez’s story, but he jumps in Ayers’ head so many times I didn’t have a frame of reference.

The typical “true story” exaggerations likewise do more harm than good: Wright depicts L.A.’s terrible homeless problem by creating a hobo jungle that looks like the personification of every Tom Waits song ever written rolled into one. A useless subplot involving Lopez’s ex-wife (he never divorced) wastes our time and Catherine Keener’s.

Normally, a lack of narrative focus signals that a film has failed, but “The Soloist” gets so much right that I just can’t bring myself to dismiss it. Foxx and Downey put in some of their best work, and many moments of the film truly inspire. Nevertheless, inconsistencies and a scattershot second half force me to give “The Soloist” merely a tepid recommendation.

Zodiac

David Fincher is certainly no stranger to crime thrillers: his breakthrough Se7en remains one of the best pieces of neo-noir ever produced. But his return to serial killer dramas, Zodiac, stands as his finest achievement. Based on the real life murder spree of the unknown "Zodiac Killer" in the San Fransisco Bay Area in the late 60s and 70s, Zodiac follows the lives of the detectives and reporters who got caught up in the case that spanned numerous county lines and decades and was never officially solved.

If nothing else, it's a bold film: Fincher opens the film with a string of the Zodiac's murders and then structures the other two hours or so as a police procedural in which a handful of people who become obsessed by the case try to sort out the various clues and cut through the red tape to find the truth: who is the Zodiac Killer? The early murders play out with a horrifying quality, not only because of how Fincher understates their deaths but because we know these people actually died, and for no other reason than they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

After the Zodiac murders a young woman and seriously injures her boyfriend at the start of the film, he sends in a cryptic letter to the San Fransisco Chronicle, admitting that he shot the two teenagers and promising to kill again if the editors don't print a portion of a cypher he sent to them (he sent the other two parts to other newspapers). Crime reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) gets on the case, and is soon joined by an unlikely aide: cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), a man who loves puzzles and obsesses over the killer's cypher.

For over two hours, Graysmith tries to put all the pieces together as all those around him give up; Paul Avery becomes paranoid when the Zodiac announces an intention to kill him, and eventually loses everything to alcoholism before winding up with emphysema. Detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) works with Avery and Graysmith but eventually gets buried under the red tape involved with the cross-county investigation. That in particular made the Zodiac so brilliant: by committing crimes all over the place he prevented any one person from figuring it all out.

But Graysmith never gives up; years after the Zodiac stops killing, he tries to consolidate the various pieces of evidence into a book in the hopes that, if all the facts are placed in one location, maybe someone can figure out the identity of the killer. People repeatedly ask if the intrepid, doe-eyed young man is "some kind of Boy Scout or something," to which he chirpily responds "Eagle Scout, First Class!" His dogged determination wins him the grudging respect of many of the detectives who find themselves routinely astonished by the things that Robert digs up.

Technically, the film employs Fincher's visual genius, but in a far more understated manner than his usual effects. He uses digital tricks not to add in the expressionist nightmares of Se7en or the fantasy splendor of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button but to cast a dreary gloom over the Bay Area. Fincher never shows us the media phenomenon the murders created, but he captures the mood of a city gripped in fear with its muted colors and dour feel. It works so well that it's a little hard to make out the effects at all

I've heard some people complain that the film fails because it doesn't tell you who the killer was. Some people are just plain stupid: is Fincher really supposed to solve an actual cold case for the purposes of entertainment? Personally, I find the film to be astonishing; Fincher throws a lot of facts and figures at us for 2-1/2 hours and not once did they bore me. At its heart, Zodiac is a police procedural about police procedurals, whose hopelessness and cynicism is tempered by the knowledge that even if crimes go unsolved, a few individuals are willing to do their best to solve them no matter the cost. Fincher has a few modern classics under his belt, but here is his first true masterpiece.