Something Old, Something New: Déjà Vu / Resident Evil: Retribution

More belated links. At Movie Mezzanine, I compare two great Vulgar Auteurist pieces, Tony Scott's Déjà Vu and Paul W.S. Anderson's Resident Evil: Retribution. Check it out.

The Top 10 Tony Scott Films

[This is an entry in my Favorite Directors Blogathon.]

It can sometimes be difficult to separate out Tony Scott's gifts as a populist filmmaker when stacked against less skilled "cacophonists" like Michael Bay who followed in his wake and whom he left in the dust with his late-career reinvention. But in Scott's films are a care for his actors wholly absent for so many of today's blockbusters, and his movies consistently offered up some of the finest, most sincere performances to be found in action films. Scott's unabashed affection for working-class heroes forced to rise to the occasion gives his films a humanity that makes even his wildest efforts (and most savage, like Man on Fire) are not merely meat grinders. Not everything Scott turned to gold, but until his tragically truncated end, he found ways to turn the inherent excesses of blockbuster filmmaking into aesthetic statements rather than wan spectacle. He will be missed, but at least we still have his work, of which these 10 stand out as highlights:

R.I.P. Tony Scott, 1944-2012

I was devastated last night to read of Tony Scott's suicide in Los Angeles. One of the most exciting filmmakers working in Hollywood today, Scott had been on a hot streak of exquisitely stylish genre movies for years, from 2004's ideologically dubious but aesthetically revolutionary Man on Fire through 2010's exercise in pure cinema, Unstoppable. His late career works resemble abstract paintings, dotted with splotches of color laid over each other with frenetic abandon and interpretative elusiveness. Using handcranked cameras, superimpositions and other techniques nearly as old as the cinema itself, Scott set down a modern blueprint for filmmaking, one that has been imitated but never equalled for its cumulative technical and tonal effect. The Michael Bays of the world have since thrown all their coverage into one hulking mass in an attempt to match Scott's kinetic fury, but they wind up only with incomprehensible messes where he somehow emerges with some of the only auteurist statements of Hollywood blockbuster cinema.

I can think of no other mainstream director so readily capable of reconstructing the nature of memory. His finest two works of the Aughts, Déjà Vu and Domino, are both fractured narratives driven by the skewed perceptions of their leads. In these movies, the overlapping, conflicting, obscuring nature of their recollections ultimately set to work on the present itself, changing the couse of events through sheer force of aesthetic will. So outlandish is Domino that one almost believes it can alter the fate of the real Domino Harvey, who died a few months before the film's release.

To attribute a director's movies to their own mental state is a gross misapplication of auteurist criticism, but part of what makes this death so shocking is the indefatigable optimism of Scott's work. In an age dominated by lazy cynicism and irony, Scott would upend whole narratives to get a happy ending. Most famously, he altered Quentin Tarantino's intended, dark denouement for True Romance to one of hard-won joy, offering as justification only, "I wanted these characters to live." An almost childlike defense, but one also containing the innocence and blunt purity of a child. It is also, frankly, an improvement upon Tarantino's script, turning his hip, nonlinear exercise into something fluid and, as my good blogging friend Andreas (his superb site here) put it on Twitter, "surprisingly lyrical." In retrospect, it might have been Scott's treatment of Tarantino's screenplay, more so than Pulp Fiction, that really showed the power of Tarantino's writing.

So often criticized for favoring style over substance (I do not have the energy to combat that ridiculous uncritical phrase right now), Scott's overwhelming style has run through my thoughts all day. I think of the horrific crashes that dot the giddy cheese of Days of Thunder. The almost lilting approach to the ultraviolence of True Romance, turning its climactic shootout or Patricia Arquette's savage fight for survival against James Gandolfini into fairy tales without losing the repulsiveness of the carnage. The way that subtitles are transformed from a focus-absorbing block of text at the bottom of a screen into an interactive part of the full visual picture in Man on Fire. The breaking of a silo car in Unstoppable, making the frame literally grainy as the contents of the train compartment billow out in a blizzard. The lighting of Keira Knightley's face when she fires a machine gun in the climax of Domino, the bursts of muzzle flash illuminating her anguished, furious face in a series of stuttering freeze frames. The dark tunnel where Travolta's character strands his hostage train car in The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, inexplicably soaked in neon colors because why in God's name not. The time-bending car chase in Déjà Vu, almost prescient in anticipating a world of tablets and Google Glass with its multiple screens and images laid over each other in kinetic oblivion. Or, of course, the looming image of Paula Patton in the same film, haunting Denzel Washington's hero as much as Kim Novak torments Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo.

These flourishes, and so many more, continue to fly through my mind at the same speed with which Scott threw them on the screen. I still have so many of Scott's films to watch, pre-9/11 works I must see for the first time or revisit and reassess. I had looked forward to that for some time, the chance to catch up with the director I found more exhilarating and, yes, substantive than nearly anyone else operating in the American mainstream. But now each ticked off box on the checklist will bring a tinge of regret, the awareness that I am exhausting my supply of "fresh" Tony Scott experiences, which can never be replenished. I can take some comfort, though, in the knowledge that those same films will surely offset some of that sadness with their inevitable triumphs, of happy endings so shameless that gross implausibility could not dampen their spirit. I can only hope they continue to have that effect.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (Tony Scott, 2009)

Tony Scott's remake lacks any and all suspense (as do nearly all his movies despite his penchant for thrillers), but he also finds a surprising resonance in the material. Blessed with a superbly written script, Scott tones down his usual madness and lets his actors do most of the work. Oh, he still can't help himself at times, but Scott puts his talents toward a sense of visual pacing and structure that uses the battle of wits between Garber (Denzel Washington) and Ryder (John Travolta) to slyly bring out back story and sociopolitical themes.

Travolta hams it up to no end, playing ex-con stock trader Ryder like the demon of Wall Street unleashed below the city, his outrage at serving time for his white collar crimes well-timed to the outrageous entitlement displayed by the real stock brokers who took all kinds of shortcuts to make a fast buck. Garber too is guilty, but we see the disparity between them, greed motivating one and financial desperation the other. Washington and Travolta have the awkward task of playing off each other mainly through long-distance radio communication (an analog take on the potential for meaningful friendships through Internet communication?), but they make for one of the richest hero-villain pairs in years and get across some unexpectedly keen social commentary to boot, even if Travolta oversells it. Supporting players John Turturro (as an arrogant negotiator), James Gandolfini (a scandal-ridden mayor) and Luis Guzman (a former MTA employee nervously helping Ryder) also deliver solid performances.

Scott frames his film with flattened compositions, a beautiful array of neon-lit streaks of blue, red and green, and Scott's "Big Board" fetish realized by the flashing subway map back at Rail Control (a board framed, like all of Scott's giant screens, as a means of both clarifying and abstracting action). Yet despite his usual touches of altered speeds and on-screen text, Scott's aforementioned ease off the throttle shows that his love of visual style does not blind him to seeing and focusing on the great chemistry between Washington and Travolta. In fact, as a movie about a sedentary narrative spruced up by slick, action-oriented direction, I found The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 to be not only more tasteful but more emotionally affecting than Danny Boyle's slick con job 127 Hours.


Sidenote: I don't know if Travolta decided to play Ryder as a flagrant homosexual or that's how the part was written, but if and when he ever comes out of the closet, expect this movie to be gutted for clips on late-night shows. Dressed like he just came from a gay bar, Travolta finds ways to be even more suggestive. Describing a teenage hostage to Garber, Ryder notes his outfit and tangentially throws in "he makes it work" before getting back to the threats. Talking with one of his cohorts about Garber, Ryder bypasses the fact he doesn't know what the man looks like and says, "He's got a good voice, though; he'll be my bitch in prison." Bless his heart; he seems to know he'll never be a star again and at least balances out his usual tat with unorthodox performances in this and Hairspray.

Déjà Vu: You've Never Seen Something Quite Like This Before

My review for Tony Scott's masterpiece, Déjà Vu, is now up at Cinelogue. A digital version of Vertigo, Scott's film probes issues of obsession, fractured identity and time travel, always focusing on the emotion over narrative. It represents the apotheosis of Scott's poetic chaos, taking his complicated, arrhythmic preference for the subjective, stream-of-consciousness close-up and incorporating it into the always-corkscrewing nature of time travel. Plot holes abound, but Scott masterfully controls the aspects of the film he wants to stress most. For all the film's talk of terrorism and its open acknowledgment of such travesties as Oklahoma City, 9/11 and Katrina, Déjà Vu is largely apolitical. Instead, it gives us the alternative to the false closure of revenge: the desire to go back and prevent the whole thing from happening, saving hundreds, maybe thousands, and especially that one person you'd give anything to see again.

Please check out my review at Cinelogue.

Domino

Tony Scott's Domino is simultaneously one of the sloppiest yet most fascinating American mainstream films made in the last 20 years. It combines the slapdash abilities of two of the most off-the-wall filmmakers working today into a hodgepodge that displays the best and worst of both. It contains Richard Kelly's swirling eddy of jumbled, half-baked ideas as filtered though Tony Scott's postmodern pseudo-poetry. The entire film has, as someone in the film says of a television executive, "the attention span of a ferret on crystal meth." And yet, when the film clicks, it manages to push the most outlandish elements of Kelly and Scott's élans to their extremes, to the point that the whole thing goes collapses in on itself, a red giant becoming a denser white dwarf. Somehow, it works, precisely because it doesn't.

Perhaps the only bit of honesty in the whole damn thing is the opening disclaimer that flashes, "Based on a true story" on the screen before another bit of text, almost as an afterthought, fades in: "Sort of." From the start, voiceovers and shots add exposition even as they bewilder. Scott loops sections of Keira Knightley's dialogue with his layered shots, starting in medias res not only within the narrative but within the background Domino Harvey (Knightley) provides about her life and her missions as a bounty hunter. Every so often, the film folds back in on itself, filling in details of the plot, some of which rearrange seemingly resolved stories with new perspective.

Scott cast Knightley in the role of Harvey, a model-turned-bounty-hunter, after seeing her in the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, but there wasn't much in The Curse of the Black Pearl to hint at the part she plays here. Domino represents the opposite of the majority of Knightley's other roles, an anti-glamor punk who turned to busting noses to vent her Soho and Beverley Hills-injected ennui. She works in a team with Ed Moesby (Mickey Rourke), the greatest bounty hunter in L.A., and Choco (Édgar Ramírez), a street urchin getting out his own psychopathic rage through chasing down bail skippers. Together, they break down doors, crack heads and generally confuse everyone who sees two juiced-up apes with a lithe, petite pixie in tow, a sight all the more confounding in that the lumbering, more experienced masses seem to follow her lead.

Domino unfolds in flashback as the protagonist recounts a horrifically botched job to an FBI psychologist (Lucy Liu). The first action we see is a shootout in a mobile home involving a locked freezer filled with money and a decoder ring on a severed arm, and just what the hell just happened is not fully explained for another 80 minutes. This is one of the more normal sequences of the film. Kelly went hog-wild with his treatment, connecting Domino's early life with her bounty hunting career by having her first assignment end with a lap dance to diffuse a tense situation (natch).

Scott, meanwhile, takes his leap forward with Man on Fire and makes it look like the most aesthetically conventional action movie around. The framing device setting up a flashback leads to a narrative that flashes back, forward and seemingly sideways at will, duplicating the image literally with Scott's production effects and recreating the image in broader terms when each scene is invariably echoed down the road with new details.

If Man on Fire showed Tony Scott broadening his artistic palette, Domino shows him upending his bag of tricks on the table. Besides the sickly yellow gauze that washes over the film, Scott shifts film speed, exposure and lighting on a dime, overlapping images, his long lenses blurring the edges of the frame and capturing the object of focus in almost uncomfortable detail. Domino shares more than a few tricks with Scott's previous adaptation of a narratively daring upstart's script, True Romance, albeit in a more frenzied tone. The reveries in which Domino pours out her thoughts in the narration over half-connected imagery recall the lilting "Gassenhauer" sections of True Romance, and the final shootout is a bigger and bolder take on Tarantino's humorous climax. Even as Scott heads into new territory, he finds ways to tie himself back to his earlier work.

That referential streak extends beyond Scott's own corpus into a host of pop culture items that are paraded about the film on stakes. Domino's father, Laurence Harvey, was an actor, and we see him when The Manchurian Candidate comes on TV -- "I knew Frank Sinatra," chimes in Ed, to which more than one person at different parts responds, "Who didn't?" (Ed also claims to have jammed with Stevie Ray Vaughan and hooked up with Pat Benetar.) The Jerry Springer Show gets lampooned directly with Springer himself joining the fray, while the aforementioned executive (Christopher Walken, who communicates solely in his various tics as if someone made a supercut of his weirdest and funniest moments) signs up the bounty hunting team for a Dog the Bounty Hunter knockoff that glamorizes them in a manner that both disgusts and allures the Hollywood-detesting Domino. Tagging along for that show are former Beverly Hills 90210 stars Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green, whom Scott torments with constant references to their age and faded profiles, to say nothing of the physical punishment he metes out to them. The film even references Alf via the Afghani driver/demolitions expert. "He once ate a cat," Domino randomly supplies in a voiceover before clarifying: "We don't know how to pronounce his fucking name so we call him the cat-eating alien."

Had Kelly himself directed the film, he might have attempted to make some form of satire out of these references, but Scott uses them to contextualize his aesthetic and the offbeat, absurdist humor of the piece: the attention-deficit visuals grow out of the odd assortment of cultural touchstones assembled here and arranged by a man who trained as a painter. It's the perfect marriage of class and tastelessness.

Perhaps my favorite aspect of the film, however, is the manner in which Scott, whether intentionally or not, heads off any attempt on Kelly's part to try for any depth. Donnie Darko was riddled with symbols and metaphors that opened up interpretations beyond the bog-standard nature of the actual narrative, but Scott seems to take particular delight in throwing every potentially meaningful image at the wall until all that's left is a splattered collage. Domino constantly returns to the metaphor of a flipped coin to discuss her chances of survival during a job, and Scott shows a coin flipping in the air endlessly, often in front of a backdrop of an icon of Jesus, which in turn sometimes flashes back and forth between Jesus' and Choco's face. Domino's goldfish also enters into the fray, and given how many shots are repeated to the point of becoming motifs, even a seemingly meaningless image becomes a deliberately empty "symbol" through suggestion. The scene involving Tom Waits (ever the show-stealer) as some mystical wanderer in the desert proves this best of all: he speaks in portents but is divorced from the narrative even as he envisions the finale. The message is that there is no message. By stripping Kelly's more esoteric and muddied aspects and making them at once even more vague yet streamlined, he makes the strongest and most cohesive work Kelly's ever written, keeping all the fun and engaging doublebacks and misdirections while leaving out the thin satire (here, it's just dark comedy, and it works magnificently).

Despite the ridiculous pace the film maintains, Domino sags under the strain of its moving parts, most of them barreling ahead in opposition to the rest. But I still can't help but love the movie. Scott's visual style is so playful, overshooting someone and drifting back to proper framing as if someone accidentally put the outtake reels of setting up the blocking into the canisters for copying and distribution. He does not attempt to make the film about anything, instead using his knack for detail to paint an emotional abstract of what would otherwise be a painfully uninteresting film. I can not get the memory of the college kid's foot shaking in antsy impatience, the actual lion roar that comes out of Choco's grimacing mouth while on mescaline or the illuminated glimpses of Knightley's furious face in the climax as she fires assault rifles in darkness. Domino allowed Scott the chance to take stock of all that he'd learned with both the camera and the editing suite. He would refine the best of his abilities for use in his next project, and he'd end up making his masterpiece.

Man on Fire

Man on Fire was not Tony Scott's first triumph, having streamlined Quentin Tarantino's script for True Romance into something that actually benefited from outside tampering and scored two solid genre movies with Enemy of the State and Spy Game. But it was his 2004 film that set off Scott's modern reinvention as perhaps the most daring, or at least egregious, talent in American action film. Using a glossy/grainy digital aesthetic, endless in-camera effects in opposition to CGI and and remarkably sensual approach to blockbuster filmmaking, Scott would take the slapdash construction favored by such sloppy directors as Michael Bay and forcibly bend it toward something approaching poetry.

Scott's visual élan explodes from the start, as alternately slow and fast motion film, heavy grain, overexposure and even a fade to black and white gussy up the first images of the film. A scroll of informative text rolls across the screen saying that a kidnapping occurs in Mexico once every 60 seconds. When the text disappears and the frame unfreezes, Scott leaps into pure frenzy, layering overexposed images as cars speed up and shove people into backseats as onlookers scream helplessly. In this moment, the director reveals his biggest stylistic leap, that of deeply subjective filmmaking, rooted in the perspective of agitated people under extreme stress.

American cinema has occasionally posited the idea of a bodyguard hired to watch over children, but usually in a comedic way, playing on the idea that burly-'n'-surly trained mercenary juxtaposed with precocious tykes equals yuks aplenty. Yet as Man on Fire notes, kidnapping has grown to such an epidemic in Mexico that the bourgeoisie there have taken to hiring bodyguards out of necessity. A retired CIA operative, Rayburn (Christopher Walken), invites his old friend John Creasy (Denzel Washington, in the first of his collaborations with the director) to his comfortable estate in Mexico City to offer him such work. Aware that Creasy, a former Recon Marine, has lapsed into alcoholism and despair, Rayburn thinks that a steady job looking after a panicky middle-class family would be a way for Creasy to get his demons under control. Rayburn's even got a job lined up for Creasy to watch the daughter of a businessman (Marc Anthony) who does not particularly fear any kidnapping but wishes to placate his American wife's fears as cheaply as possible.

Scott's muscular but tender approach finds its perfect outlet in Washington, who has been steadily bulking up his entire career as if combating the onset of a paunch years in advance. But he's yet to lose that twinkle in his eye and the disarming power of his smile, and he can still collapse and entire film around him with one good look. Before he mentions his substance issues or chugs a drink, Creasy lets us know of his problems solely through Washington's body language, still mostly erect through rigorous military training but sagging through revulsion, not sloth. Those eyes never seem to look anywhere but inward, and the glimmering chrysalis that encases them suggests Creasy doesn't like what he sees. He takes the job because he has no other options, and his isolated depression makes him a mobile obelisk following around the chirpy, mature-beyond-her-years daughter of Samuel and Lisa, Lupita, or "Pita" for short (Dakota Fanning).

Bravely, Scott devotes nearly a whole hour to Creasy's ingratiation into the Ramos household. This arc follows the expected path -- hardened ex-soldier slowly warms to young girl's charms -- but cliché is only ever unbearable when nothing about it is new, and Scott's inventive framing combines with believable performances from Washington and Fanning to make for a friendly chemistry that practically never exists between child and adult.

Pita, at this point used to having a bodyguard, has the forthrightness of a child mixed with the no-nonsense talk one has with an employee, making her almost unbearably blunt. "Being black, is that a positive or negative in Mexico?" she asks Creasy as he drives her to school. "Time will tell," replies Creasy in that sardonically chipper tone that says he's already fed up with the conversation. Yet the sudden reintroduction of the in-camera effects after the (relative) calm when street people swarm the car in rush hour show that as much as Creasy may not care about her, he still won't let her get hurt, and he's still got his sharp instincts.

Only when a night of heavy drinking leads to a failed suicide attempt does Creasy finally merge those retained instincts with an actual interest in Pita's safety. Scott is brilliant with the suicide sequence, the frame warping and skipping as Creasy stumbles around in despair not unlike Willard at the start of Apocalypse Now. The cuts bewilder in a meaningful way, disorienting as the character is disoriented, occasionally stopping on such minor, beautiful images as whiskey dripping from John's sagging lip. The bullet he places in his gun misfires, and suddenly the frame calms as the experience centers Creasy. Scott isn't just playing around, he's getting at something here, a feeling rather than merely a presentation.

Creasy's epiphany leads him to start living life again, and he warms up to Pita in the usual way, helping her with history homework and awkwardly tiptoeing around the subject of concubines. Scott even devotes considerable time to the unnecessary sideplot of Pita's swim training just to allow her connection with Creasy to deepen. A full 45 minutes into the film, the biggest development in Man on Fire is the swim meet that allows Pita to put all the advice and practice Creasy helped her with into practice. Scott probably could have gotten away with making a film without any explosions or gunfights, so skilled is his ability to make this more human drama so kinetic.

Then, it all changes. Coming out of her piano lesson, Pita is cornered by kidnappers (and colluding cops), and not even Creasy's valiant efforts can prevent her seizure. Severely wounded, Creasy lies in a hospital bed as the police accuse him of murdering two officers and the Ramos family scrambles to retrieve their daughter, using an insurance policy Samuel took out to collect $10 million for a drop-off. But the drop goes awry and the kidnapper's nephew dies, leading the man to tell the family that he will not return Pita. When news of the girl's presumed death reaches Creasy's room, he wrenches himself from his bed and vows to kill anyone who had even the slightest involvement in Pita's kidnapping.

Unfortunately, Man of Fire soon lapses into too typical a revenge fantasy, presenting Creasy as a one-man army tearing his way through Mexico killing all in his path. Even the numerous twists of the narrative do not complicate the film so much as provide clever asides in Creasy's single-minded killing spree. He tortures information out of lackeys as he rises the ladder of a criminal organization, uncovering police corruption and even a more unexpected collaborator.

Scott's modern work is based fundamentally on feelings and moods, not the grandeur of typical blockbuster bombast, yet Man on Fire shows the director trying to fully break from the latter. Thus, the film occasionally shifts between his more intimate style and a larger focus, and the break from visceral immediacy hurts the film. Scott could also have done with some trimming, not, surprisingly, in the 50 minutes of build-up but the repetitive tedium of Creasy's rampage. Where the beginning displayed Scott's élan in such extraneous but delightful moments as the speeding up of the image as Creasy drives through a tunnel or the close-up of the daffodil Pita picked for Creasy situated next to his necklace of St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes (another gift from Pita), the rest of the film spends too much time playing Creasy's sickening bloodlust with a straight face. While the idea of Pita unlocking not only Creasy's humanity but his monstrous past brings up interesting if narrow possibilities, but Scott does not follow up on the potential theme.

Still, not all of Scott's violence here is as simple as it seems, and the more thoughtful approach he'd take to it later peeks through here and there. Pita's kidnapping is one of Scott's greatest sequences, communicating not Creasy's badass cool but his desperate concern for Pita's safety. He may have a steady aim and be seemingly impervious, but that's because his focus is entirely on the girl. The scene climaxes in a beautifully framed moment as a wounded Creasy and corrupt cop shoot each other, the sound cutting out so only Pita's terrified gasp is heard. Too often, though, I found myself pining for Scott's exciting framing of Pita's swim competition instead of the carnage of his his third-act mayhem.

Ultimately, Man on Fire is more coherent than Scott's subsequent Domino and Déjà Vu but lacks the avant-garde invention of those films. It also lacks the more focused narrative-driven tautness of Unstoppable. But the film still shows the major evolution of a director whom no one would suspect of being at the forefront of mainstream innovation. So many little touches, such as Scott's gleeful breaking of the 180^o rule to the incorporation of subtitles into the frame, placing them in the middle and animating them to coincide with the mood -- Lisa's tearful Spanish spoken to the kidnapper is translated in wavy subtitles, while the oft-repeated phrase "I'm just a professional" appears on-screen despite the words always being spoken in English, a motif of self-absolution from those in Creasy's sights. Though it may lack the power of subsequent efforts, Man on Fire still has enough ingenuity to stand out among revenge fantasies, and as much as I continue to feel let down by the brutality, I also continue to find myself moved by the ending, which coalesces the violence back into the sensual feel of the film's first half. There, he gets it all together; later films would show him applying the combined skills in full.

Unstoppable

As I've yet to track down a copy of Déjà Vu on Blu-Ray and would prefer to stick solely to that film's considerable merits, I figure I might as well use Unstoppable as an excuse to make a somewhat shameful cinephile confession: I adore Tony Scott. Not his early, more commercially friendly material, mind you, but the increasing chaos of his second-stage work. His work in the new millennium has placed him in the nebulous, bizarre realm between the gauche incoherence of Michael Bay and the sensualist poetry of Wong Kar-wai. Yes, I said it.

Yet where Bay contents himself to roll around in incompetence, stringing together half-narratives out of weightless ultimatums (there's an asteroid! No more questions!), rapid edits designed to mask the formlessness of his shots and a sickening gauze slopped over the whole proceedings -- to say nothing of his cocktail of racial stereotypes and light misogyny -- Scott's films are more tactile and resonant. Though his narratives of late have been just as abstract as Bay's, Scott infuses his films with a focus on emotion, his own lack of clearly defined structure revealing an elliptical plotting than a futile attempt to outpace his inanity.

Unstoppable, then, may be the film to remind people who fell off the Scott wagon when it hit an elevated rail curve in excess of 75 mph. Befitting a movie about a runaway train, Unstoppable is as linear as the path to which that train is bound. Without the narrative-bending worry of time travel to worry about, Scott can devote his full energies and his host of in-camera effects to jazzing up the CSX 8888 incident that occurred in northwestern Ohio in May 2001. But the changes he makes to further dramatize the story bring out some of his pet topics in recent years.

Scott turns the pre-9/11 incident into a post-9/11 one, updating the event to coincide with our altered perspective. And by changing the setting from Ohio to the even more blatantly post-industrial area of southern Pennsylvania, the director creates a blend of the natural and the manmade, the rural areas through which rails run evoking the nation's past and a more prosperous and adventurous time before running into urban decay, the endpoint of America's Manifest Destiny and the rush to industrialize.

When Will Colson (Chris Pine, looking fresh-faced even with his considerable stubble) arrives at his first day on the rails, he finds older workers who've seen that decay get worse over the years. A table of old-timers grumbles over Will's last name, linking him to the union bosses that surely gave this newbie his job through nepotism. Even without that foot in the door, though, Will and other young men likely would have taken their jobs anyway. It's cheaper to start a bunch of rookie labor at entry salary and let them go before benefits accrue than to keep funding the pensions and modestly larger checks of the vets.

Will partners with Frank Barnes (Denzel Washington), who eyes the young man with the same suspicion his friends cast upon the newcomer. Will, the conductor, may be in charge of the freight train they're running that day, but Frank won't let the slightest error go without comment. A Saturday Night Live sketch spoofed the trailer for the film, playing up the overt hints of bromance and grudging-mutual-respect buddy comedy, and Unstoppable certainly contains that element. After hounding Will's ass all morning, the two bond over familial troubles, Frank with his daughters who work at Hooters and care little for their father's admittedly half-hearted attempts to win them over, Will with his estranged wife.

However, Scott's interest in macho standoffs elevates their chatter over mere pablum. Though his explorations of masculinity have never risen above a sub-Michael Mann level, Scott has a keen eye for surveying how men puff out their chests in front of each other; after all, the men in his films always toughen up and preen themselves when dealing with other men far more than they do to woo a woman. Denzel, with his shaved head removing any gray and maintaining the lingering youth of his bright face, teases, almost flirts, with Pine, that adorable young upstart with the most striking pair of baby blues to come along since Alexis Bledel. Part of the reason I never saw Scott's remake of The Talking of Pelham 123 is that the movie that played in my head -- of Scott using Travolta's butch posturing as a means of messing with that latent homosexuality so many see in the actor -- would likely be more revealing than the actual movie, and Unstoppable adds an age component to the mix, creating a faint paternal bond in addition to the usual bromance.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the freight district, the world's laziest train engineer (Ethan Suplee) has the simple task of moving a massive train loaded with enough cars to make it the length, yes, of the Chrysler Building from one area of the storage yard to another. As he only has to move the thing a bit, Dewey does not bother to tie the air brakes on the train, and when he notices a switch up ahead hasn't been activated, he jumps out of the cab to throw it himself. When he moves to get back on, the throttle slips to full speed and he cannot catch up. So now there's a giant train with no brakes barreling down the rails against incoming traffic. Oh, and did I mention that it's loaded with highly toxic and combustible chemicals?

Scott's in-your-face direction works marvelously here, distracting us from the inevitability of the runaway train coming into contact the other trains we see along the way -- the protagonists', a passenger engine carrying school children ironically there to learn about rail safety. He warps the dimensions, rarely giving us a full look at the locomotive and its cargo to emphasize how massive it is. The screech of metal on metal builds in the sound mix, overwhelming the ears and sounding like the beastly howl of a giant monster. When Frank and Will decide to unhitch their cargo and chase after the train in reverse to hook up to its rear and slow the thing down, Scott avoids the dramatic pitfalls that might come with two objects following the exact same path under constant surveillance by always stressing the pain in the men as they struggle to catch up to the speeding bomb. When they hit top speed and still cannot close in, the mounting sense of panic extends to the audience.

Impressively, Scott uses a bait-and-switch to lure the audience into a much tawdrier brand of suspense picture before moving into something much more complex. The trailers advertised the chemical train on a collision course with the one carrying children, but that particular tragedy is averted early on, shifting the focus away from a cheap, exploitative plot to one that calls more attention to the sociopolitical implications of the story. Back at the station, Connie Hooper (Rosario Dawson), the yardmaster, tries to coordinate efforts but is stymied every step of the way by the corporate higher-ups who prove willing to sacrifice lives before profits. While others calculate the human cost of the train derailing on the sharp elevated curve in Stanton that couldn't possibly handle such a massive train at such a high speed, the executives, personified by the company's vice president (Kevin Dunn), cannot even stop thinking about money when considering worst-case scenarios. Thus, the train itself becomes something of a metaphor for a, wait for it, runaway economy, set in motion by those smart enough to know how the components work but too lazy to do the job thoroughly and with integrity, then perpetuated by those who stood to make the most money off the disaster.

To be honest, though, what caught my eye was the masterful and scathing indictment of the "24-hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator" as Jon Stewart termed the media in his closing speech at the Rally to Restore Sanity. The use of fake telecasts as a means of communicating plot developments has become increasingly common lately, but Scott plants his tongue firmly in cheek and reveals almost the whole of the film through news. As Dunn's VP and the other executives come up with every more useless measures designed to save money and maybe stop the train too if that would help, the media spends no time trying to get to the truth of their inane actions, accepting a refusal to comment without protest and instead swarming the rail line for coverage. TV station helicopters circle around the train so rapidly and hungrily that one concludes that anyone looking to pilot a chopper for TV news should have military training in advanced flying techniques just to avoid crashing into the other five choppers in the vicinity. Snatches of trite anchor commentary crackles at the edge of the soundtrack as Scott jumps from news footage back to his own look at the action, and we hear fatuous remarks like "That was so crazy!" said with ratings-hungry glee as a man's life is lost in one of the company's abysmal schemes. They sound uncannily like the same pundits who compared night vision footage of the bombing of Baghdad to video games. (I was also particularly amused that Scott made reference to the crutch of news footage as plot device when Dunn throws up his hands in a fit and asks why they can only ever get updates on the train from the news and not their own people.)

Unstoppable may lack the formal daring of Déjà Vu, but it easily ranks among Scott's finest work, a commemoration of post-9/11, average Joe heroism wrapped in the dark comedy of its Ernest Goes to Oklahoma City feel of accidental domestic terrorism. I've wanted to see the film since it came out, but the intervening month has brought a news story that makes the commitment to saving others at the risk of death and lasting injury from toxic fumes all the more apt: I'm speaking of course of the Republican senators voting down health care for 9/11 first responders, denying desperately needed coverage for those suffering complications arising from their acts of selflessness and patriotism. Frank and Will have no reason to risk themselves, the former being edged out to circumvent full retirement benefits, the later brought on solely as cheap labor, but they do it anyway because they would not consider the alternative.

This severity is some of the smartest material to yet appear in a Scott film, but what makes him so endlessly entertaining is that he never devolves into polemics. Fundamentally, Unstoppable has fun with its narrative, taking joy in making vehicles bound to a set route unpredictable. Backup characters like Kevin Corrigan's half-officious, half-amiable safety official and Lew Temple's madman, redneck railroad welder are fantastic and, along with Dawson and Dunn, some rare examples of interesting side players in a Scott film. As for the aesthetics, the washed-out look of muted colors cannot bleach the beauty of his backgrounds, both the forests and the industrial dumps, and they seem even more vibrant when blurred outside the speeding cabs. The only garish element is the yellow safety vest Will wears, which clashes so violently that even Frank demands he take it off in the middle of danger just to avoid insult added to injury.

Scott loves his film grain, and he compounds the hazy look of the movie at the climax by placing a container of actual grain at the back of the runaway train that explodes when the two trains meet, spraying grain over the grain. It's a hilarious, boyish trick that only someone as clever and wry as Scott could pull off in popcorn entertainment, and it's as delightful as any of the more subtle moments in Unstoppable. See it. Otherwise, there will be a hole in your 2010 viewing...the size of the Chrysler Building.

True Romance

I've mentioned the sad Weinstein spiral elsewhere, but certain films remind me of what a potent force they used to be. When they headed Miramax, they displayed a formidable ability to pluck the hottest unproven talent from the Sundance pool, pair them up with established heavy-hitters, then sit back and let the magic happen. Perhaps the greatest example of this is Good Will Hunting, in which then-unknowns Ben Affleck and Matt Damon (who'd both had acting work but nothing to launch them) wrote and acted under the direction of indie legend Gus Van Sant to great effect and critical acclaim. My personal favorite, however, the closest meeting of the minds, came when Quentin Tarantino, hot off the success of Reservoir Dogs, sold a script to hyperkinetic madman Tony Scott. It was a match made in B-movie heaven.

True Romance, Tarantino's take on romantic comedy, received positive, if muted, response upon its release: critics praised its visceral style and unrelenting bizzaro love tale, but criticized it for the same reasons. Scott and Tarantino later put out a director's cut infinitesimally longer, with only a few scenes placed back in or lengthened just long enough to show more blood, but the added schlock actually fleshes out the picture a bit, giving more time to minor characters (all of whom are played by some mighy familiar faces). What you're left with is a film by two craftsmen perfect for each other, yet just different enough to temper the weaknesses of the other.

Tarantino's dialogue overflows as it flies from the mouth of Clarence Worley (Christian Slater), an Elvis obsessive who is on his way to the art-house theater for a kung-fu marathon on his birthday at the start of the film. He tries to chat up a chick in a bar into coming with him, but she declines. Clarence takes it in stride, and he appears only slightly fazes by the rejection. Then firecracker named Alabama (Patricia Arquette) sits next to him in the theater and asks him to catch her up. Soon, they're sharing pie in a diner and they go back to his place. Alabama runs out afterward, and she admits that she's a call girl (not a prostitute, she says) hired by his boss to show the introvert a good time. Clarence continues to prove an unflappable character, and even admits he figured it was all too good to be true. A twist: Alabama falls for this dope's sweetness, and they quickly elope.

OK, so it's a bit weird, but there's nothing that different from Pretty Woman, albeit knocked down a number of rungs on the social ladder. Then it all goes mad. Clarence tracks down Alabama's pimp, Drexyl, to inform him that Alabama will no longer be in his employ, which naturally ends in violence. Now on the run carrying a sack full of Drexyl's uncut cocaine, Clarence and Alabama try to unload the drugs to provide them with enough money to get away while staying ahead of both the cops and the mafia who funneled their drugs through the pimp.

Slater and Arquette, not normally scene-stealers, prove entirely capable of carrying this film, as you believe their warped but (as the title says) true love. The sweet, milquetoast Clarence can turn on a dime and become a truly intimidating character when someone threatens his beloved, while Alabama, sadly under-developed even in the longer cut, also has a darker side that bubbles to the surface without feeling forced. Both give the finest performances of their careers, and I can't see anyone else pulling their roles off half as well.

Aiding the two is a non-stop cavalcade of fantastic supporting appearances from stars both established and rising. Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper appear in a scene as a mob boss torturing Clarence's father, and their conversation, dubbed "the Sicilian scene" is Tarantino's second best chunk of dialogue following Jules' final speech to "Ringo" in Pulp Fiction. Tarantino received some (possibly justified) flak for what was perceived as unnecessary racist exchanges in Pulp Fiction (i.e. "Dead N-word storage"), but in this scene the writer displays a remarkably sly grasp of racism and how people can be driven by it. Clifford knows that the mobster bases his identity on his Italian heritage, and he also knows that he cannot withstand the torture and will unwilling divulge his son's location. So, he uses his final moments to regale Cocccotti with Sicily's history, specifically that the Moors (Africans) invaded Italy hundreds of years ago and "they changed the bloodline forever." The scene gently crescendoes until Clifford sardonically says that the Sicilians are "part eggplant." Coccotti laughs and engages in the usual "gedda look at this kid" mafioso cheek-pinching before suddenly pulling his gun and shooting Cliff dead. "I haven't killed anybody," Walken hisses, "since 1984." Never does this scene insist upon itself or play its hand too soon, and only at the end do we realize that this was Cliff's plan all along.

Walken and Hopper aren't the only memorable side-players, however; no, True Romance, as with Tarantino's best work, is ultimately an ensemble piece. Gary Oldman pours all of his off-kilter magnetism into Drexyl, the dreadlocked, gold-toothed pimp with such golden lines as "It ain't white boy day, is it?" Years before Tony Soprano thrust him into the spotlight, James Gandolfini plays a ruthless mob thug who "interrogates" Alabama, while Brad Pitt, still an actor of little note, absolutely walks away with the picture as the stoner roommate of Clarence's actor friend Dick (Michael Rapaport). His delivery of the line "Don't condescend to me, man" is as memorable as anything else he's ever done.

These loopy, minutiae-obsessed characters are kept interesting because Scott makes sure to throw in some gloriously overdone violence every now and then to keep people from getting to talky. Likewise, Tarantino's loquaciousness and attention to character gives the film actual roots that tether Scott's frantic style to some form of reality (though you could hardly call anything that happens in the film "realistic"). The various shootouts are all grisly and visceral, but the also carry some emotional weight thanks not only to the writing but Hans Zimmer's ethereal, subtly haunting score. His compositions are airy and light, as if recorded on wind chimes, and they have a disturbing tranquility when played over the shocking violence that underscores both the warped fairy tale nature of the screenplay as well as the general demented state of the action.

I read that someone recently re-edited the film to follow Tarantino's script, which offered up a more fleshed-out Alabama, a larger part for Samuel L. Jackson's virtually non-existent cameo and a non-linear narrative structured like Pulp Fiction. While the idea of seeing a more defined Alabama intrigues me, I highly doubt that the cut, which uses deleted scenes with noticeably less post-production refinement, will improve upon this. Though unquestionably a better filmmaker, Tarantino benefits somewhat from another hand guiding his project, and a slew of brief but commanding appearances, bolstered by the impressive performances from its leads, makes True Romance the most bewilderingly touching gonzo romance ever filmed.

The Last Boy Scout

Every so often a film comes along that manages to cram every criteria of a genre into bloated whole, but even rarer are the ones that do so and manage to be utterly surprising. Perhaps the best example of this is Tony Scott's buddy-cop extravaganza The Last Boy Scout. Even though it tackles the range of buddy clichés in a way that is in no way subversive, the off-the-wall mash-up of explosions and bad puns keep you rooted in your seat.

The film opens with a moment of stunning violence, and not the kind that pumps up an audience. A star quarterback gets a call telling him he better win, so he takes some PCP and takes to the field, only to shoot members of the other team and finally himself. Not exactly a thrilling start.

We then meet our hero. Bruce Willis, channeling all of that Die Hard everyman charm, plays Joe Hallenback, a drunken louse of a man who seems at his wit's end. The most ironic aspect of the film, Willis uses Joe as a commentary for the fallout of Willis' then recent flop Hudson Hawk; Joe used to be at the top of his game, but now sleeps in his clothes and walks around unshaven and unkempt. His wife sleeps with his best friend, which sends the personal stories of the characters into a tailspin at the start.

Then the cars start exploding. If you take only one thing away from this film, it's to never drive a car, because all of them are rigged with C-4. Every last one. No wonder the American auto industry failed; they're installing bombs in their vehicles. The first kills Joe's friend before they can remotely work out their problems, and somehow launches Joe into a plot involving sports corruption.

Along the way, Joe meets Jimmy Dix, a disgraced ex-footballer whose meteoric rise was cut short by gambling and drug charges. Dix is played by Damon Wayans, who surprisingly downplays his clownish side and actually plays straight man to Willis' Joe. As with just about all buddy cop films in which one of the buddies is not an officer, we get little reason as to why the cop would put a civilian into constant jeopardy.

From what I can gather of the scattershot and utterly unbelievable plot, the Los Angeles football team manager, Marcone (Noble Willingham), is bribing a corrupt senator to legalize sports gambling to rejuvenate the sagging NFL. Jimmy somehow got involved with all this because his girlfriend found out and tried to blackmail Marcone into getting Jimmy back on the field. It sounds simple, but the mind wanders when the 8th car explodes for no reason.

When you think about it, this is Tony Scott and Shane Black's attempt to make the 80s American version of James Bond. Joe seems like a normal bloke, but early on in the film we learn not only that he was a Secret Service agent but that he saved the President's life. I'm really struggling to think of something that's made me laugh harder. Joe has no gadgets, but otherwise he operates just like Bond: apart from them both being agents at some point, Joe also speaks in terrible puns and must foil a ridiculous plan. He fights wave after wave of killers who get him in the crosshairs only to start spouting monologues, giving Joe the time to outwit them.

It all culminates in a supremely over-the-top showdown in a stadium in the middle of a game. The place is packed with fans, who cheer at the battle instead of fleeing like sensible people. But this is not a sensible movie, and it's only fitting that this grab-bag of explosions and pieced-together plot would end to the roar of an approving mob. In that sense Scott and Black show a keen self-awareness; though they do not subvert any of their clichés and use only the slightest hints of irony, they know how ridiculous the film is.

Unfortunately, I could not lose myself into this OTT spectacle because of its rampant and shocking misogyny. I'm not one to place women on a pedestal away from harm (because any fool could tell you that relegating women to the sidelines was the problem for decades), but treating every. single. woman in the film as something to be used and discarded crosses a number of personal boundaries. Even Joe's young daughter gets led around the place at gunpoint for most of the film. It doesn't serve the plot and seems there only to get laughs out of the macho target audience.

Therefore, I cannot really recommend the film as a classic. However, I can't fully pan the film because it's extremely well-made and doesn't take itself seriously. Willis' lines, though corny as all get-out, are frequently funny, and the action scenes make up for their more street-level scope with a gloriously over-the-top plot behind them. Sure, there's only one or two big shootouts, but even the small stuff seems significant when cars blow up all over the place. So how do I rate it? I did enjoy the film quite a lot despite its sexism, and though I never want to see it again for that reason, I'm sure people could glean at least some entertainment out of the film. So I guess I sit in the middle of the film, too pretentious and (I'm sure some will say) P.C. to lose myself fully, but thrill-seeking enough to not hate it for its darker depictions.