Brian De Palma: Mission: Impossible

Though not nearly as deconstructive as De Palma's '80s pastiche and travesty, Mission: Impossible feels like a classical, identifiably "'90s," art-for-art's-sake blockbuster, a bit of formal excess that uses the implausibility of the original TV series as an excuse to make no sense whatsoever. Unburdened from the need for logic, the film unfolds as an incessant series of double-crosses, grandiose setpieces and classical techniques. That coherent aesthetic propels the film long after its narrative becomes a mire of betrayal and intrigue.

Sent to intercept a diplomat selling U.S. secrets, the Impossible Missions Force team led by Jim Phelps (Jon Voight), stakes out an embassy with precision planning. But just as everything seems to be going perfectly, tiny cracks begin to form, and in short order sabotage leaves the entire team dead save for Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), who looks mighty suspicious when superiors inform him that they are hunting a mole in the organization. Betrayed by the true traitor and now suspected of treason by his bosses, Ethan has no choice but to flee and clear his name. These betrayals, real and imagined, are but the first in a film where the dead return and mirrored shots always reveal different perspectives.

Piranha 3D

If you see only one movie this year featuring a man's penis being eaten by a ravenous horde of prehistoric fish, by golly make it this one. Piranha 3D is not a sequel to the old, schlocky franchise so much as a reboot of the first film, itself a blatant ripoff of Jaws. Thus, when Richard Dreyfuss shows up in the first scene of the film singing "Show Me the Way to Go Home," director Alexandre Aja instantly crystallizes what the film has to offer: a tension at all times undercut by a wry point-of-view.

This is only exacerbated when Dreyfuss' character, sloshing about on a wee fishing boat, drops a beer bottle into the lake, and somehow the light touch of a sinking bottle setting down on a lake bed already covered with litter causes an earthquake that frees a horde of prehistoric piranhas trapped in a hidden reservoir for millions of years. Anyone who would point to this as highly unlikely is just being an asshole.

The unleashing of a swarm of killer fish into Lake Victoria coincides with Spring Break, and the family-friendly throngs of visitors of Amity Island cannot compare to the bikini-clad, hosed-down nymphets and Axe body spray-gargling frat boys who turn the place into an orgy with awful, awful music for a week. In this frenzy, it's difficult to make out the locals, who conveniently do not have to book hotels to get front-row seats to more wet t-shirt contests than you can shake a beer bong at. Yet poor Jake Forester (Steven R. McQueen) immediately stands out as someone who did not elect to come here, an awkward teen who looks disappointed that his sheriff mother (Elizabeth Shue) won't allow him to join in any of the fun but seems the sort of fellow who wouldn't enjoy all the partying if he did manage to get into the fracas.

For the first 45 or 50 minutes, Aja makes a noble stab at actual suspense. He gives us enough shots of people swimming and narrowly escaping a horrid death they do not perceive to inject tension into the film. Even as he sets up the absurdity's of Jake's plot -- sneaking out of babysitting duty to show a Joe Francis-like, amateur pornographer (Jerry O'Connell) the hot spots of the area while his love interest Kelly tags along in the most awkward manner possible -- the director shamelessly manipulates the 13-year-old that lingers in the minds of the overwhelmingly male demographic to whom this film appeals. In between every shot of bared breasts is another amusingly clichéd moment of horror that knows how silly it is but tries to make us jump anyway.

Then, Aja just goes mental. Not coincidentally, the tipping point lines up with an appearance by Christopher Lloyd, who gives one of the most inexplicably knowledgeable chunks of expository dialogue this side of a John Carpenter movie. His urgent gasps set up the next sequence, one of the most insanely gory setpieces I have ever seen. As with Jaws, the people splash about, unaware that anything's wrong, and when the sheriff learns about the piranhas and attempts to close the lake, the invading youth ignore her commands pay her no mind.

Where Piranha 3D breaks from Jaws is that Spielberg's film involved but a single giant killer, a beast that could only attack a single person at a time. But a swarm of thousands of tiny fish can converge upon multiple victims. Armed with a surprisingly sophisticated effects team, Aja stages a grand-scale carnage that comes to resemble less a rip-off of Spielberg's masterpiece than the Omaha Beach sequence of Saving Private Ryan. Dozens of large-breasted (female and male, to be honest) undergrads find themselves stripped away in seconds. The scale of prosthetics involved in this project, from legs reduced to a few clumps of jagged flesh hanging off entirely exposed bones to scalped swimmers caught in the blades of self-centered individuals who power their boats to shore without helping anyone. In seconds, the hints of camp erupt into outright frenzy, but there's enough carnage on the screen that even the director has to take a step back every now and then to retain his humanity.

It's understandable that the studio would hold the film from a critical screening, what with the sight of several porn stars hired to present their wares before dying horrible deaths and the stiff dialogue. However, the actions of the studio demonstrate their own lack of faith in the project, as Piranha 3D is so well-made and so self-aware without being aloof about it that it instantly appeals to the cinephile's love of the trashier side of things. Aja cares primarily about boobs and blood here, but the staging of the film, right down to its deliberately and appropriately kitschy use of 3D, is so cheeky yet knowing that the film is destined to be a party favorite for cinema lovers looking for something to help them unwind as it will be for junior high school lads who will make sure their parents are out of the house before whipping out (so to speak).

The cast works brilliantly, from Lloyd's Sam Loomis-esque pseudoscience to Adam Scott's seismologist diver, refreshingly cowardly at first instead of conducting himself with unbelievable poise. O'Connell has an absolute blast playing Derrick, and you can see him in scenes actively trying to make you hate him before the fall. The younger actors don't have the same experience, but they acquit themselves nicely for a film that only needs them to create a focal point for the disparate scenes of carnage. But it's Elizabeth Shue who carries the film, instantly conveying a bad-ass demeanor that is thankfully never sullied by moments of woe-is-me sobbing, even when she faces the prospect of her children dying an unimaginable death.

Aja's choreographed bloodbaths rely on the same gore wizardry of George A. Romero's classic Dead films, which also had the power to make you laugh in spite of yourself even as you turned away in revulsion. Like Romero, Aja never gives in fully to the torture porn aesthetic, making sure to keep his softcore separate from his feeding frenzies. For him, the piranhas are not so different from the youth who descend upon the town. Both are finely tuned hive minds with a single purpose: for the humans, it is to get wasted and laid. For the fish, it's to feed. Don't expect any social satire, mind you, but there's an actual, working mind running this show.

Piranha 3D isn't particularly fulfilling viewing; in fact, it might just devour a part of your soul. But it manages to present its buckets of blood without being flippant about the comedy. Thus, no one scene of the film is completely hilarious without an undercurrent of stomach-churning disgust under it, but it's nice that a horror-comedy can program that disgust into its makeup rather than simply engendering it in the audience. Still, be sure to bring some friends along to make everything that much wilder.


P.S. James Cameron said that this film's use of 3D was gimmicky. What he fails to understand is that 3D is a complete gimmick, and Aja's use of it as such is so much cleverer and more enjoyable than the admittedly (far) superior use of the technology in Avatar. Please, keep giving me films that know 3D is crap instead of the ones acting like it's the next great leap forward despite being 50-year-old technology.

Bringing Out the Dead

In preparation for the upcoming Martin Scorsese Blog-a-Thong for the Large Association of Movie Blogs, the following is a re-write of the first Scorsese movie I ever reviewed on this blog. I've scrapped the first entirely in favor of this review for two reasons: 1) My opinion of the film, which was already positive, has changed considerably, to the point that I consider it the director's second-most underrated film after his satirical masterpiece The King of Comedy, and 2) because the first article was unsatisfactory on every level, a shoddy reiteration of plot with little interpretation.

David Bordwell recently posted an article -- to call attention to its quality would suggest that Bordwell (or his wife, Kristen Thompson, for that matter) is ever not at his best -- that outlined Martin Scorsese's use of both French Impressionism and German Expressionism in his work. Anyone who truly pays attention to the director's films will know that the "realism" label bandied about without a care holds no weight: Scorsese's impeccable eye for detail and character certainly add a bedrock of verisimilitude to his corpus, but even the exacting production design of Gangs of New York is interpretative.

This is relevant because, of all the director's films, none throws any pretense at realism to the wind quite like Bringing Out the Dead. Its first moments, a shot of an ambulance speeding through Hell's Kitchen that cuts to the eyes of its driver, Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage), being processed through numerous color filters as he careens through the city at warp-speed (a direct reference to the first shots of Taxi Driver, albeit played in fast-forward). These shots, and their existence as a frenzied update of Scorsese's greatest film, set the tone of the film: Taxi Driver cooled enough to use its protagonist's mental state to explore larger issues, but Bringing Out the Dead never leaves its tortured insomniac, never allows for anything but the slightest break for air.

It's fitting that, to date, the film should mark the last collaboration between Scorsese and Paul Schrader, as the film shares stylistic -- even narrative ties -- to not just Taxi Driver but Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ as well. The imagery of blurred lights, ubiquitous steam and cascading colors updates Taxi Driver with better technology and more money, yet Scorsese heightens them not simply because he enjoys a bigger budget but because of the lack of control Pierce has over his life; unlike Travis Bickle, Pierce is not the steady pilot of the vessel that ferries him through hell. Objects appear normally, after all, in the windshield; they only blur as you pass them. Pierce agrees: "The biggest problem with not driving is that whenever there's a patient in the back, you're also in the back. The door's closed. You're trapped."

Pierce himself contains elements of Jake LaMotta (his blindness to anything but his own pain and desires) and Bickle (take your pick), but the character he most resembles, after a fashion, is Scorsese's Jesus. Pierce cannot sleep because he's been unable to save any of his patients recently. This failure to literally save people recalls Jesus' doubt over his own message, which the people in Last Temptation begin to distort even before his death, centuries before His word would be completely corrupted by the Crusades and various inquisitions. Pierce, however, cannot seem to manage any sort of salvation: in his first shown assignment, he tends to a man in cardiac arrest who by all accounts is a goner. But he instructs the family, crowded around in fear and the mounting grief of lost hope to play some music that the man liked, as it "helps." Pierce than manages to get a pulse, but this "miracle" clearly had little to do with the Sinatra croon wafting through the apartment, its purpose merely to distract the family from their pain. The man, as we'll see throughout the film, didn't die because of the music, or even because of Frank and his defibrillator, but because Hell's Kitchen has torn him down too many times without killing him that he's not about to start now.

That patient hangs over the rest of the film, in a constant flux between life and death -- he flatlines a dozen times a day and is brought back each time. References are made to his "fighting spirit," but the darker implication is that he fights to die, not to live. He instructed his family not to call 911 and even locked himself in the bathroom to prevent easy access. Thus, this patient comes to embody Pierce's growing self-doubt and his troubling new ideas: "In the last year," he says, "I'd come to believe in such things as spirits leaving the body and not wanting to be put back. Spirits angry at the awkward places death had left them." Frank, with his twisted messiah complex, slowly kills himself for the sake of his patients, and his constant losses wreak havoc with his head. Suddenly, his ideas of saving others begin to lose their pull: "I came to realize that my work was less about saving lives than about bearing witness," he says. "I was a grief mop." Ergo, Pierce serves not only as a Christ figure but his own apostle, attempting to save lives and consoling others (and himself) when he fails.

The other reason that the ever vacillating man plays into the story is in the introduction of his daughter, Mary (Patricia Arquette), one of the more compelling female characters to grace a Scorsese film. Mary, like Frank, cannot decide whether she wants her father to live or die, having suffered abuse as a child yet still unable to let the man go. Arquette excels at these characters, broken women fragile enough to need help in this world yet strong and determined enough to boost others. As such, she becomes Pierce's focus, neither as a love interest nor (à la Bickle) a symbol of anything but simply as the person who may hold the key to his stability, just as he, a kind man in a horrible city, may give Mary the support she's never had.

It's scarcely conceivable that anyone could get by in Scorsese's image of Hell's Kitchen on their own, though so many are made to. Taxi Driver spread its hellish effect over all of New York City, but Bringing Out the Dead reveals that the expanse of New York's hell was actually a dissipation of evil. Hell's Kitchen concentrates that evil into a subsection filled with despair, and its nightmarish imagery is all the more arresting because it's so much easier to identify with Frank and his perception of this nightmarish world. The hospital where he brings his patient, Our Lady of Mercy, is dubbed Misery by its patients and staff; whenever Scorsese returns to it, scanning over its aisles choked with patients who outnumber the rooms, the cops who spend so much time dealing with the wounded criminals and overdosing junkies that they, in their harsh black uniforms, become as much a part of the hospital staff as the white-clad nurses and doctors, who are hardly more sympathetic than the merciless cops. The streets are covered with brain-fried, punch-drunk loonies who cannot be called gutter trash because the gutters are too full to accommodate them. It's such a terrifying microcosm that a dying man (Michael K. Williams) swears that if he lives he'll join the army "where it's safe."

As is fitting for the work of a paramedic, Bringing Out the Dead is very episodic; spread across three nights, each night pairs Frank with another EMT who also suffers from the constant stress of so much death and pain, and each night he travels through segments of the larger segment that is Hell's Kitchen. On the first night, Frank travels with Larry, who attempts to outpace his own breakdown by focusing on the next meal. He cannot eat the same meal two nights in a row, because remembering what he ate the previous night might also conjure memories of the trauma to which he attended. Larry would typically like to avoid as many jobs as he can, so Frank must take the initiative to respond to any call. By the second night, though, Frank is the one who wants a break, which he never receives as Marcus (Ving Rhames) zealously pilots their ambulance to every incident in search of "miracles." Marcus spends the night railing about the Gospels and preaching like an evangelist at the scene of an accident, but his constant flirting with the female dispatcher with whom he shares a dalliance undermines his piety. Marcus and Frank are even present for what someone insists is a virgin birth, of twins no less, but Frank cannot accept this as the miracle that Marcus does as one of the twins -- the one he handles -- dies from complications. Of course, no one really believes that the woman gave birth as a virgin, save the man who saved himself for her.

Marcus' outlandish personality -- as well as his hair, which manages to be both curly and slicked back -- somewhat recalls Screamin' Jay Hawkins, which is appropriate for what is by far Scorsese's most pop music-oriented film; Martha and the Vandellas, Van Morrision, Sinatra, The Who, The Rolling Stones and so many more make appearances, generally increasing in rocking edge as the film wears on and Frank's resolve wears.

So, by the time that Frank teams up with Wolls (Tom Sizemore), whose own frustration with his job has manifested itself in anti-Hippocratic rage against his patients (or victims), the soundtrack is dominated by such punk rockers as The Clash and Johnny Thunders. Frank teeters on the brink by this point, and what is most affecting about Wolls' outbursts is not how insane and violent they are but how closely they mirror the final stages of Frank's self-annihilation. Despite his constant warnings against Wolls' behavior, Frank's first major breakthrough comes when he screams at a suicidal man and offers to help the man kill himself, who flees in terror; "We cured him!" Wolls laughs, but the absurdity of the moment is undercut by the realization that it really is the first person we've seen who might be better off for Frank's intervention. Later, a junkie, Noel, who appears every night in some fit of chemical (internal and external) imbalance and incurs Wolls' wrath, manages to redirect Frank's own budding madness; Frank and Wolls catch him smashing cars with a baseball bat, but when Frank agrees to help Wolls catch and beat Noel, he ends up venting his anger by hitting a car of his own.

The dark comedy of this moment pervades the film. Frank, disillusioned with his role as a savior incapable of rescuing others, wants to stop his torture but cannot bring himself to stop self-harming on his own (a Scorsesian theme that stretches back to his 1967 short The Big Shave). So, he reports to each of his shifts late, or leaves early to try to get some sleep that never comes; his captain finally confronts him on this, but he's got a wild hair up his ass that transforms his anger at Frank for sloppy work into self-righteous defiance of the system. Frank does everything but come right out and beg to be released from this torment, but the captain interprets the rage as a sign of dedication and not only retains Frank but offers the "unlucky" son of a bitch an extra week of sick time. So many people return to Misery for drug overdoses, alcohol poisoning and brawl wounds that the head nurse (Mary Beth Hurt) knows many patients by name and chastises them and threatens to withhold treatment like a mother exercising tough love.

This lunacy adds to the warped perception of Hell's Kitchen, which results in some of Scorsese's boldest visual invention. The lights around the ambulance seem to blur as they're seen through the tears caught in Frank's eyes: he never quite cries after all, no matter how close he comes. The ambulance moves through Hell's Kitchen in such a frenzy that Scorsese films it from above, or with the camera entirely on it side, and images are often processed through the windows and mirrors of the vehicle, distorting if not completely destroying them. Just as Scorsese had characters glide in Mean Streets and GoodFellas to show how they perceived the places they felt most welcome, so too does he fluidly rush up the stairs to get Frank and Larry to Mary's father. Frank hallucinates a stoned dream of the ghosts of those he failed to save reaching up to him from a street pavement as he literally raises the dead, and a recurring image of a young girl named Rose, whose death set his collapse in motion, tortures Frank (this would of course be reworked and used again in Shutter Island). And few scenes in all of Scorsese's canon are as shamelessly Expressionistic (or bizarre) as his rescue of the drug dealer, somewhat kind and somewhat evil, impaled upon a metal girder below his apartment window. As Frank makes his first unmistakable, physical save of the film, the blowtorch cutting the girder sends up sparks. Almost romantically, with Frank cradling the weakened dealer's head, no less, Cyrus remarks that he can feel the heat of the warming metal, which pierced his chest. With such unabashed artistic touches, is it any wonder that the usual hospital dispatcher who sends Frank on these assignments is voiced by Scorsese himself?

Cage pours all of himself into the role, as the part could not work with any less an effort. His hangdog expression is perfect for such a downtrodden character; when he tiredly counters Mary's fleeting attempts to justify her father's past behavior as a method to make her strong to survive the city with, "The city doesn't discriminate. It gets everybody," his fatalism seems more human and strangely empathetic than cynical. That perverse humanism defines his final act, in which he puts Mary's father out of his misery rather than force the man to live with a micro-defibrillator in his heart for the rest of his life simply to sate Frank's need to keep someone alive. Searing, white light often highlights action in Bringing Out the Dead, usually when focusing on the dead and dying. It's an ironic use of holy light to show the terrible act of death, but then there's always been a certain contradiction between the horror of mortality and the hope of everlasting life it brings. By allowing Mary's father to die, however, and by returning to Mary, Frank not only releases the messiah complex that keeps him up, he also attains some of the holiness he so desperately chased, at last falling asleep in Mary's arms as Scorsese bathes in light. Travis Bickle's "redemption" was caked in blood, but Frank attains his by the absence of the red stuff that coats him everywhere else. As perfect as they were for each other, Schrader and Scorsese would do well to not undermine the chapter-closing image of this last shot, content to let it summarize their remarkable work together and to bide its time until people at last realize what they've overlooked.

Out of Sight

Out of Sight's opening sequence is one of the most delightfully witty heist scenes you'll ever see: a suave man dressed in business attire approaches the counter and charmingly tells the clerk that his partner, currently speaking to one of the managers as if opening an account, will shoot the man in the head if she makes one false move. The plan goes off without a hitch -- the robber knows not to take the bills at the bottom of the register, does his best to keep the clerk calm, and he walks out of the bank without anyone the wise. Then his getaway car doesn't start.

That's Out of Sight in a nutshell: a deftly cool comedy of errors, one whose characters have all the details in place save the most basic. Jack Foley (George Clooney) has been robbing banks since adolescence, so many he's lost count, and he views prison as more of a timeout than a punishment. Enlisting the help of two of his buddies -- well, maybe just one buddy and a mutual acquaintance -- Jack stages a break-out and ensures his success by ratting out another potential escapee to divert attention.

In his escape, he happens to meet U.S. Marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez), who is stuffed into the trunk of her own car along with Foley while his accomplice Buddy (Ving Rhames) drives them to safety. Because this is a film, Karen and Jack develop an instant attraction to each other. Because this film is based on an Elmore Leonard novel, it is somehow brilliant.

Soderbergh captures Leonard's deft characterizations, witty dialogue and involving plot with aplomb: Clooney and Lopez have such believable sexual tension that your TV will probably give off static electricity when you're done watching the film. The dynamic between them, and the question of whether Sisco pursues Foley out of love or to take him down, creates a sexual tension rarely felt in your average, manufactured rom-com, a genre that, for all of Out of Sight's crime elements and Soderbergh's inventive camera trickery, seems to be the best fit for the film.

The rest of the cast excels with the material as well; Rhames then had numerous thug/crime boss roles under his belt, but here he serves as Jack's conscience, practically begging Foley to, just once, think before he acts but unfailing in his support for his friend. Only on a second viewing did I even recognize Albert Brooks as a millionaire we meet in a flashback of one of Foley's stints of prison, using his finances to ensure his safety, particularly from Don Cheadle's Snoopy Miller, a sadistic thug who milks the terrified white-collar criminal for all he can.

Steve Zahn shows up as Glenn, the accomplice nobody wants on his team but always knows just enough to justify his position in the crew. Zahn steals most of his scenes, because he's Steve Zahn; his goofy charm provides overt comic relief in a film already bouncing with cleverness, but he brings enough paranoia and self-awareness to the stoned fool to anchor him to the story. Perhaps my pro-Zahn bias influenced my perception of the character: I adore Steve Zahn, and he makes every film he graces with his presence just that much better. Hell, I even enjoyed the National Treasure movies because Justin Bartha's character reminded me of Steve Zahn.

Soderbergh does not simply rely on these killer performances to see him through to the end, however. With editor Anne V. Coates, who also photographed Lawrence of Arabia(!), Soderbergh enacts a creative rebirth after being largely cast aside through the early '90s. Shots end in freeze-frames and softly fade into the next one. As he would do in his future films, Soderbergh plays audio from some other shot under another; is the audio a memory? A dream? If so, whose memory or dream is it? The editing adds to the mystery of the relationship, so that when Jack and Karen meet in a bar, it's anyone's guess whether the scene will end with the two shagging, in a car returning Jack to prison, or with one character jolting out of bed sweating from that crazy dream they just had. Soderbergh further displays his off-kilter and often brilliant cinematic sensibilities by casting Michael Keaton as FBI Agent Ray Nicolette, the same role he played in Jackie Brown. I don't know if this is the only time that an actor has played the same role in two unlinked films made by separate directors, but there's something so exciting about the way Soderbergh makes cinema a part of his movies.

I can't find much to criticize about Out of Sight. It's dense and it folds back on itself more than once, but that only adds to the film's intrigue. It has all the wit and cheek of the Ocean's films without their narcissism, giving each character their foibles to balance out their first-impression personalities. The cast uniformly excels, and they look like they're having fun with the material without forgetting why they're there. But for all the bouncy quality of the actors and the wit that flows freely from their mouths, Out of Sight occasionally puts forward a moment of simple, effective truth. How many other heist films would allow their protagonist the clarity to ask of their plan, "Do you know anyone who did one last big score and then gone on to live the good life?"