Steven Spielberg: War of the Worlds

It's just as well that War of the Worlds was hobbled upon its initial release by the lingering effects of Tom Cruise's infamous couch-jumping whatever. If Americans were going to let a stupid thing like that distract them, who knows how they might have reacted if they realized what all the movie had to say about 9/11 and the still-raging debate over Iraq. Even the conclusion of H.G. Wells' original novel, forecast in the opening credits expanding outward from single-cell organisms to humanity and even the cosmos, reflects the pitfalls of the War on Terror. "Occupations always fail!" declares a mad character late in the film, and one gets the distinct feeling he isn't just talking about invaders from Mars.

But War of the Worlds is, for the most part, not a commentary on the War on Terror so much as snapshot of what inspired it and how the national emotions of panic, grief, rage and bewilderment contributed to it. There's no criticism here; that would come with Spielberg's other 2005 film. No, War of the Worlds' primary aim is still to function as a blockbuster, but in its finely detailed, occasionally surreal construction is an almost therapeutic attempt to recreate an event fresh in the nation's mind, all the better to study it and to (hopefully) make a more informed decision than we did when that day actually happened.

Brian De Palma: Mission to Mars

Brian De Palma's Mission to Mars is the film you'd least expect from the maker of gory, cynical deconstruction who delighted in adhering to genre tropes as much as he did tearing them apart. A PG-rated space adventure released by Disney, Mission to Mars looks on its face like the ultimate sellout move, an embrace of everything De Palma hated now that he could be trusted to make a profit off his work. Certainly critics and audiences found it easy to go with their gut; the film eked out a box office so thinly above the budget it likely falls within the margin of error, and it received scathing reviews from professionals and amateurs alike.

But I see a remarkable film, one that puts all of De Palma's generic immersion and aesthetic strength to use at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum. Here is a film so unabashedly optimistic that De Palma can open on a barbecue with red, white, and blue colors used without a drop of irony, no mean feat for man who loves his American flags huge and imperialistic. And even if one wants to play the usual simplistic game of "Who is De Palma ripping off today?" the closest you'll get is Star Wars by way of 2001. Considering that those two films stand at polar ends to each other, suggesting De Palma is just playing the plagiarist holds even less water than it always has.

Green Lantern (Martin Campbell, 2011)

Watching Green Lantern in 3D is like watching a glowstick through sunglasses, the already unimpressive neon goop dimmed to a murky hum of sickly light. Its dulled visual scheme matches the narrative, a story about a man chosen for the highest honor in the universe that has all the excitement of finding out one has been selected to be a Nielsen family. In fairness, this movie is not as bad as the increasingly increasingly garish X-Men: First Class, which is aging in my short-term memory like milk left out in a hot sun. Green Lantern at least lacks the pomposity and waste of recent blockbusters, but it makes up for this "shortcoming" with a stupefying lack of creativity, in a film about a hero whose power is his imagination.

The first sign of the dearth of ideas is the hero himself. The Hal Jordan of the comics, a conservative, stoic pilot without fear, is replaced with a smarmy jackass played with much-practiced knowing by Ryan Reynolds. Jordan here is nothing more than Tom Cruise's character from Top Gun, to the point that, after he becomes the titular hero and inevitably saves the day, I expected Hal to buzz the giant lantern core on the planet Oa, making the gruff drill sergeant Kilowog (voiced by Michael Clarke Duncan, because of course he is) spill his galactic coffee all over himself in surprise and rage. But, if wishes were horses...

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

With the recent demise of At the Movies, various clips of classic arguments, pans and raves have received regular play on blogs. One of the most frequently cited, and truly one of the finest moments of the program, is the hilarious split between Siskel & Ebert for the abysmal early '90s comedy Cop and a Half. Siskel, essentially speaking for the nation, hated the film, and his open-faced astonishment at Ebert's thumbs up conveyed the collective reaction of the audience. Cop and a Half became an occasional reference point in the pair's arguments for the last five years of their partnership, possibly replacing Siskel's fondness for fat jokes when looking for an easy jab at his rival.

Yet Ebert's obstinate refusal to feel bad about liking the film, even years later, reveals something important about dumb comedies: if you laugh, you've got to give them a positive write-up. And, God help me, few contemporary screen comedians make me laugh as hard as Will Ferrell. Yes, dear reader, he does the same thing in every film, and at times his shtick wears dangerously thin, but when he works, he works brilliantly. There's something enticing about coiled-spring comedy, in which a mild-mannered individual calmly reacts to the world until suddenly exploding in pent-up rage. Some excel at this (John Cleese, Jason Lee), others simply come off as deranged (Adam Sandler, to a lesser extent Chris Farley). Ferrell is one who can manage it, presenting a thick-headed veneer of unflappable confidence and pride until someone finally points out what a fool he is, setting in motion the eruption.

With Ron Burgundy, Ferrell has a prime vehicle for communicating this talent. Set in the '70s, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy draws a broad caricature of a man with the intersecting lines of the "Me Generation" and the egotistical realm of the TV personality. Ron Burgundy doesn't do any reporting or fact-checking; furthermore, he seems barely literate, only just capable of reading what's placed on a teleprompter without ever stopping to make sure what is scrolling is correct or even logical. All he has going for him is a mustache made for television, and he acts like the arbiter of truth.

Anchorman, despite being set a decade later and being released four years earlier, almost seems like a preemptive parody of Mad Men: Ron, along with his chauvinist colleagues Champ (David Koechner), Brian (Paul Rudd) and functionally retarded Brick (Steve Carell), act remarkably like Don Draper and co. They drink in the office, act as if no law can bind them and hit on every woman in the office as if there solely as a sexual outlet. So self-absorbed are the men that, when the program's boss (Fred Willard) tells the gang that the network wants more "diversity" on the news staff, Ron believes that the word refers to "an old, old wooden ship from the Civil War era."

Casting Christina Applegate as Veronica, the ambitious reporter who benefits from this rearrangement, was a stroke of genius. Applegate's talents can be hit and miss, but when she's on, she can throw back anything chucked at her by a gaggle of male comedians, even when playing the stereotypically career-driven woman who just needs the love of a boorish man to set her on the "proper" life track of a woman. That aspect of the film is as much a joke as anything else, and it's nice that Applegate's most absurd moments involve her falling for an idiot like Ron instead of the film ever trying to sell this as a positive view of relationships.

There is an intense danger in attempting to tie higher aims to films with such Neanderthal premises, but this goofy vision of '70s local news has a smart side to it. Anchorman's placement as the first in the incomplete "Mediocre American Man" trilogy was fortuitously timed to the celebration of mediocrity and incompetence that defined the zeitgeist of the Bush administration, and Bush provided Ferrell with his biggest break on Saturday Night Live. Looking back, the endless jokes on Bush's stupidity that Ferrell conveyed during the 2000 campaign seem frothy and lightweight, little jabs thrown at a man with not much background to speak of even as the governor of a state. But jump forward eight years to Ferrell's taped one-man show, in which he trotted out the Bush character for one last run before sending him out to pasture (or behind a shed). You're Welcome America had the same focal point -- Bush's astonishing ignorance even after eight years on the job -- but what had once been cheeky now seemed vicious and outraged. No longer was Ferrell amused that a moron was running for high office; now he couldn't believe that the country had allowed such a man to run riot for nearly a decade. (In the final scene, Anchorman takes this one step further by saying that Brick would go on to be one of Bush's top advisers, an act that both homages Animal House and caters to this admittedly stretched view of the movie.)

This film, made in 2004, conveys some of that disgust, far removed as it is from politics. The outrage over a woman penetrating the homoerotic inner circle ("It is anchor-MAN, not anchor-LADY, and that is a scientific fact!" screams a belligerent Champ) shows men acting like children. Nearly all of the film's humor stems from jokes at Ron's expense, from his arrogance that is unjustified by either physical attractiveness or mental acuity to his dated belief in what's proper for women. Veronica fights to be seen as an equal, resenting the fluff pieces she gets assigned to by sexist bosses, but Ron's stories are no more important. Only Ron's gravitas makes his items seem vital, but he reports on water-skiing squirrels and the odd wild animal sighting. If this film comments on the pride Americans take in ignorance, then this angle can be seen as an attack on the vacuity of news programs and their perennial inability to cover relevant topics in favor of pandering to the broadest demographic for ratings. The Channel 4 news team thinks a panda giving birth is national news in the wake of Watergate, just as CNN now devotes increasingly less time to anything important and flounders about looking for some trite human-interest piece to save ratings. Hell, even the hysterical rivalry between news channels (other factions led by Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson, even Tim Robbins) resembles the incessant pissing contest between 24-hour news channels, and Channel 4's pure arrogance and pride for their drivel matches Fox's own.

Oh, but why weigh down the film with such a reading when its enjoyment lies in its absurdity and its endless one-liners? Quite so, but I believe that Anchorman's cleverness runs deeper than its surface titters. Satire, it ain't, but out of all the pictures put out by Adam McKay and his various collaborators in the subset of the Apatow talent pool, this is by far the most fully realized and insanely re-watchable, precisely because there's some overarching plan to all of this. It may not be an expulsion of the filmmakers' political angst, but the derth of a point that makes Talladega Nights only intermittently entertaining is wholly absent here. Apart from an ending that must surely have come to the gang while under the influence of controlled substances, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy remains one of the funniest and best-cast comedies of the last decade, so funny that even a long-ass collection of outtakes could be haphazardly fashioned into a "sequel" that is also riotous. Maybe it can rise no higher than the status of "lazy Sunday" film, but aren't the movies just so much better when they bring you out of boredom anyway? Stay classy.

The Player

People often like to say that a director or an actor couldn't have made a certain movie of theirs when they were younger, that experiences (particularly hardships from the system) shaped a new mindset that informed the film. A good example would be Mickey Rourke's performance in The Wrestler, a performance that had so many echoes in his own life that the line between player and part just about disappeared. Kurosawa himself has said that he could not have made his late masterpiece Ran as a young man.

The Player, contrary to a great many opinions I've seen, is not such a film. Robert Altman would have gladly taken a knife to the veins of Hollywood in his mid-70s heyday, when he was already considered "box office poison." It was the system itself that needed time to change in order for maximum effect. Had Altman gone after the creative titan that was New Hollywood, he would have seemed like a whiner, a sore loser who took his poor box office receipts out on the studios that allowed his genius free rein. But after Star Wars and the various hits of Steven Spielberg ushered in the wave of the blockbuster on the heels of the crumbling excesses of New Hollywood, the studios overhauled themselves back into safe, pedestrian hit-backers.

It is this Hollywood that Altman savages, the Hollywood that finally threw him to the wayside in the 80s after the commercial "failure" of Popeye. He establishes immediate distaste for this system in an epic, near-8-minute opening shot that references other great tracking shots by both style and even in name on-screen. Altman drifts over a sea of actors, many playing themselves, who all speak of projects they're working on while the producers gab on the phone for the next hit.

We meet Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins), a producer who spends his days fielding pitches. Writers and lower-level producers rush to him and sell him on their movie, in 25 words or less. If Griffin likes it, he takes it to the executive; he can't approve money for a film. So why the middle man? Well, the president can't hear every pitch of course; just as the sergeant and not the officer always seems to be in charge of the troops in a war film, producers like Mill really make the movies. The pitch-men live in fear of him, as he can kill their movie before it ever even comes close to a deal. If he likes it, it's almost a guarantee.

This stress leads some writers to take drastic measures. One day, Griffin receives a postcard that contains a death threat. Soon, he's inundated with the things. The postcards come from a writer; Griffin heard his pitch and said he'd call, but never did. Griffin's done this so many times he can't remember who it could possibly be. He convinces himself that a crazed, pretentious writer named David Kahane (Vincent D'Onofrio) is behind the threats, and agrees to meet him and approve his movie. But Kahane gets drunk and starts berating Mill, and the two eventually start fighting until Griffin accidentally kills the writer.

The rest of the film plays out as a merciless thriller, as Mill must continue to work, continue to receive death threats and contend with a murder he covered up. We plunge into the emptiness of Hollywood when a pretentious British writer pitches a paranoid Mill on Habeas Corpus, a segregation-era legal thriller with "no stars, just talent" and "no tap Hollywood ending." He makes sure to spout these phrases constantly to Mill, who says he likes the idea even though he knows how terrible the script is. Then he rallies with a clever notion: convince the president to back the film, dump the project on a rival producer, only to swoop in and tack on an upbeat ending to "save" the film, thus ensuring a promotion. Nice to see that fear hasn't crippled his business acumen.

What Altman and writer Michael Tolkin are saying with the film is that Hollywood, as with America as a whole in the 80s, fell into deep and unrestrained greed. Just as Nashville predicted the personal isolation of the 80s that would eventually manifest in the fragmented relationships of Short Cuts, The Player reflects the times, the avarice implicit in Reaganomics that only widened the class gaps. But it's not just the executives filling this role; Whoopi Goldberg plays a detective investigating Kahane's murder, but she spends a great deal of time wondering if capturing the killer is worth losing the dark comedy of letting it all play out.

The Player, as with any good piece of satire, only gets funnier the more you know about Hollywood. I imagine I would have barely found it amusing it all three years ago, and the more I read over memoirs and histories and the more I watch movies I imagine this will only get funnier. The film could easily have been little more than an excuse for actors to get together and bite the hand that feeds while patting themselves on the back (and there is an element of that to be sure), but with Altman's cynical yet human hand at the helm The Player becomes much more. Its characters are despicable but fleshed-out, and they serve not only as indictments of a system that castrates art but as an emblem of the negative side of capitalism. This is simply one of the finest offerings from one of the all-time cinematic geniuses.