The Beatles — Abbey Road

Picking one's favorite Beatles album is a fool's errand not only because sifting through the individual merits of each record falls just short of impossible but because whatever album you argue is best must essentially also fill the slot of "Greatest Album Ever Made." Sure, some people would choose Pet Sounds or one of Dylan's masterpieces, but the sheer weight of the Beatles' impact guarantees at least one of their albums in any legitimate top five (if you're Rolling Stone, who make some of the most laughable lists you'll ever read on any subject, you practically comprise the top 20 out of them). Well, Abbey Road is my pick. It is, to me, the best-sequenced, best-produced and all-around best album ever made.

Abbey Road trades in euphoria, a feeling that is all the more inspiring given the history leading up to it. The band turned to "the dark side" years earlier, and by the time of The Beatles the dominant tracks were full-on freak outs that showed a certain proclivity to violent protest even before Charles Manson irrevocably twisted the meaning of some of the songs forever. The Get Back sessions not only resulted in the first great dissolution of the band but the sort of tracks that proved it: the best songs (apart from the rocking title track) were valedictory ballads, and the worst confirmed that the band had lost whatever spark made them the undisputed kings of pop and rock for all time. Outside influences and infighting at last tore the group apart, so getting them all back together in a room, much less the same room for weeks to bang out another album must have been a herculean task, less "one more for the road" than "once more into the breach."

But reform they did, and the joy seeped into the very grooves of Abbey Road is nothing short of astonishing. Reportedly containing more three-part harmonies than any other Beatles album, Abbey Road stands as the perfect mix of the camaraderie and irrepressible pop of the band's early days with the beleaguered genius of the post-Rubber Soul era. You can see it in the album cover: after bickering so much that even the art reflected the tension in some way, the group at last appears together, without separation, in a group shot. Ironically, they've finally found something upon which they can all agree: it's time to leave.

Perhaps seeing the light at the end of the tunnel got everyone back on board and on friendly enough terms to work. George Martin returned when he was suitably convinced it all wouldn't go to hell again, and he offers up the finest work of his career, adding an extra layer of warmth to the already gorgeous recordings: "Here Comes the Sun," one of Harrison's two contributions, contains even more aural light than "Good Day Sunshine." And that can't compare to his finest contribution to the band, "Something." Unabashedly straightforward, "Something" nevertheless sounds nothing like the pledges of love that filled the grooves of the band's early albums. Instead, it acknowledges doubt and somehow makes a song in which the singer cannot describe his love, alluding to "something" about her, more poetic than the most expressive metaphor. Despite the renewed commitment to group interaction, Harrison might just steal the show.

Not that McCartney and Lennon slouch, of course. Lennon opens the album with "Come Together," the finest distillation of his anthemic hippie ideals. Its mid-tempo, riff-heavy structure made it ripe for Aerosmith to cover it without a shred of effort or differentiation, but don't let the combined overplay of both versions blind you to what a great song it is -- plus, some songs stay on rock radio for decades for a reason. His exploration with the heavier side of the spectrum continues with "I Want You (She's So Heavy)," his rolling cascade of early metal. Consisting of only 14 different words and the same chord progression, "I Want You" builds through repetition until the romantic harmonies morph into disturbing chants and lilting acoustic guitars give way to heavy distortion that reaches a fever pitch that threatens to rattle your teeth out of your skull and then...it just stops in the middle of its endless arpeggios. I wish the song reached a logical conclusion, but there's no denying the jarring, bewildering effect it has. After such complex sonic landmarks as "A Day in the Life" and "Revolution 9," who would have guessed that one of Lennon's most daring numbers could be so minimal?

The album balances striking, darker numbers like that and the wrenching "Oh! Darling," a deconstruction of the band's typical love song wracked in pain and grief, with giddy bursts of pure, unadulterated inanity. Yes, both McCartney's "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and Ringo's "Octopus's Garden" are inane and pointless, but I'd throw up these slices of the kind of nonsense that comes when the drug trip is a little too good with the cheap displays of emotion that most artists pass off as heartfelt. I don't have the slightest clue what McCartney is trying to say with "Maxwell," but damned if I don't cheerily sing along to the murderous exploits of a pure psychopath every time I spin it. Likewise, "Octopus's Garden," supposedly the result of a tidbit Ringo learned about nests octopi build that charmed him, confirms wholly the notion of Ringo as the dopey one, but it's a perfectly lovely piece of bubblegum and certainly his finest moment at the mic.

For all the brilliance in these tracks, side two leaps forward and ends the band's career with their most impressive sonic and musical accomplishment. Apart from "Here Comes the Sun," it features the multi-tracked "Because," in which the three harmony voices become nine. An ethereal take on the "Moonlight Sonata" played on the then-new Moog synthesizer, "Because" comes the closest to the feel of Pet Sounds out of all the band's efforts to mimic the Beach Boys. Following "Because," the band pulls together even as they cede the floor to McCartney and Martin. McCartney and Martin assembled some of the songs that never made it out of the Get Back sessions, and they threw them together into a bizarre suite that somehow brings out the best of the group in the truncated segments of unfinished songs.

It doesn't matter who wrote each of the individual songs that comprise the suite, as the band restructures the clips into a working whole: the bridge of "Carry That Weight" reprises "You Never Give Me Your Money," and the group originally recorded the rhythm tracks for "Polythene Pam" and "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window" as one piece. The suite contrasts instrumentation and style, but it subtly builds into a glorious burst of benediction, reaching its apex with the anthemic "Carry That Weight" and up to the solo breakdown of "The End" (everyone gets a solo, even Ringo!) and fading into a couplet that perfectly summarizes what the Beatles and the rest of the counterculture seemed to want out of the '60s: "And in the end, the love you take/Is equal to the love you make." Of course, the technical end of the album is the 24-second "Her Majesty," a giddy throwaway that, depending on my mood, either throws off the mood of what preceded it to the point that I stop the album without listening to it or I accept it for what it is: a demonstration that these kids -- none of them were even 30 by the time this came out, and only John and Ringo hit the big 3-0 when Let It Be finally rolled out of the vaults -- still had a bit of fun left in them after all these years.

It's safe to say that no band has ever recorded a farewell as complete and even forward-looking as the Beatles did with Abbey Road, and it's unlikely anyone will ever come close. In fact, the closest analogue that I can find for its hope and joy coming from such a dark personal period is Arcade Fire's Funeral, which was actually the result of three consecutive familial deaths. It's the only album where every track -- provided you take the suite as a whole -- is a perfect standalone, yet in order they clearly reveal a group strength and made-for-album format. In the years since its release, Abbey Road has become only more perfect: coming out in 1969 draws a line in the sand for the band's legacy.

After 7 years of perfecting, deconstructing, rebuilding, and starting the whole cycle over again and again, the band essentially ceased to exist on the eve of the next decade. Each decade since rock's inception in the '50s have had their representative, all of them mainstream hit-makers, who worked within the frame of pop but expanded it in fascinating ways, both musically and aesthetically. In the '50s, it was Elvis, the '70s Bowie. You could argue that it was Prince in the '80s or maybe, if you readjust your requisite level of popularity, Metallica. Radiohead muck it up somewhat, as they've obviously been the dominant musical force across two decades (show offs), but the point remains: these artists might not have been the best players of their time, but they were the perfect representatives of that time, and the Beatles were the only ones smart enough to quit while they were ahead (time will tell if and when Radiohead finally hits the wall -- let's hope it's a long time from now), and in doing so they ensured an untarnished legacy. The Fab Four of course went on to great solo success -- John and George in particular made music that could easily rank with the finest Beatles records -- but Abbey Road is the one album that, if forced to prove the group's collective and individual worth by some crazed madman wielding a gun, contains all you need to know about the band's genius.

Pickpocket

Robert Bresson's Pickpocket is, from one point of view, a watered-down version of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, one that replaces the murderous, possibly insane former student Raskolnikov with a mere petty thief and adjusts the vitriol of the work accordingly. But Pickpocket is one of the few films that just about every cineaste would name a masterpiece. Heck, when you factor in some people's inherent need to rail against the universally beloved, Pickpocket likely has more ardent defenders than Citizen Kane. That can certainly be attributed to the visual style, which mixes the sociopolitical relevance and emotional identification of de Sica with the aesthetic perfection of Kubrick, but Bresson's script does not lose focus for taming his intelligent-but-disaffected protagonist; rather, he uses his blank pickpocket to reveal the corruption and oppressive greed of society.

Unlike Raskolnikov, Michel turns to crime before he runs out of options. The Russian was starving, an ex-student because he couldn't afford food, much less university tuition, but Michel simply finds pleasure in theft. Bresson liked to use nonprofessional actors, but Martin LaSalle is so perfect in the role it's hard to imagine a star upstaging him. In LaSalle Bresson has a perfect blank slate: emotions never race across Michel's face, even as he explains in voiceovers his fear during his man larcenous engagements.

Michel is caught and arrested after his first theft, but the cops must release him due to lack of evidence. Undeterred, he returns to thieving, and even in his dispassionate narration we hear hints of excitement with his new "profession." He does not visit his ailing mother, cannot act upon his initial feelings for the woman who lives next to his mother and asks him to visit more often, but he cannot control the impulse to steal. Bresson inserts numerous shots of Michel's hands, photographing them with crystal clarity as he exercises them, writes with them and nicks wallets. He devotes so much attention to them not only because the film's action occurs through them but because they are the conduits that re-connect Michel to the world around him.

A concerned friend arranges a meeting with the police inspector to try to talk some sense into the crook, but Michel simply regales the inspector with his feeble Nietzschian idea of supermen who are above the law. Nietzsche was at the heart of Crime and Punishment as well, but Bresson takes the character in another direction. Michel isn't above society so much as outside of it on the same axis: he recognizes that society is spiritually empty, fueled by a greed that he ironically never feels. But Michel also wants to be a part of it; he wants to muster up the strength to face his dying mom, he wants to ask out Jeanne, but he just can't do it. Larceny then becomes more a sexual experience than a quest for money, and he worries about cops finding his stash of money because of its psychological, possibly sexual attachment. In some ways, Bresson filters the concept of the Ubermensch through the guilt that can only come from a Catholic upbringing.

Bresson liked to use an "actor-model" technique, wherein he stripped away the conventions of theatricality through strict rehearsals and choreographed everything to be at once naturalistic and so thoroughly planned that the actors seem mere puppets standing in for the director. It's a tricky balance, but it pays off in Bresson's execution: everyone, down to the extras, makes every movement with visible determination, and here it highlights the perfunctory nature of the world. Everything is calculated, all interactions choreographed according to mores and traditions; in this world, the unemotive Michel the most expressive of all.

Only twice does he betray any feelings to other characters. When the cops begin to apply too much pressure, Michel harangues the police inspector, but the way he methodically throws down a book to express his anger reveals how he's just putting on a show for the inspector, thinking that outrage is what a normal person would feel. The other display appears genuine; at last captured, Michel sits in prison in the end, removed from the confines of society and at last free -- has the incessant irony of this film sunk in yet? -- and so he can finally engage with the visiting Jeanne, who paves the path to his redemption, if you can call it that.

Pickpocket has some of the most strikingly aesthetic "streets" shots this side of Scorsese's early work. In particular, the scene where Michel and a group of other thieves orchestrate thefts on a train is, despite its brief length and lack of music, one of the most thrillingly edited action sequences ever filmed. Interestingly, neither the visual style nor the brilliant story takes precedence in the film; both aspects are so good and Bresson is such a master that the plot serves the aesthetics and vice versa. He might have made better films, but Bresson proves with his first original screenplay that he was a talent for the ages.

In a Lonely Place

[Revised 8/27/2011]

In a Lonely Place is almost certainly Nicholas Ray's darkest feature, using the melancholy that particularly flecks his black and white films as the most positive emotional frequency as he dives deeper into pure misery and uncontrollable, bourbon-soaked loathing. Seen today, the film hints uncomfortably at Ray's own alcoholic self-immolation, but the film is not merely a hazy self-portrait but an outpouring of social and personal anger that makes for one of the most troubling, most tragic films noirs ever made.


Though much of his technique and impact stems from his Expressionistic use of color in such classics as Johnny Guitar and Rebel Without a Cause, his monochrome noir In a Lonely Place contains almost everything you need to know about the director. The first shots, of screenwriter Dix Steele driving to meet his agent, contain striking uses of shadow that immediately establish a mysterious and sinister mood. Steele's first interactions with another character are explosive: he chats up a woman in the car next to him at a red light, then threatens to beat her husband when the man takes offense.

Through Steele, Ray projects a hopelessly bleak portrait of Los Angeles in a time when Hollywood was still seen as a beacon of glitz and glamour. They'd weathered the first of the HUAC blacklists, yes, but In a Lonely Place came out a month before things really hit the fan when the publication Red Channels condemned 151 Hollywood workers and tainted the view of the town. The darkness of In a Lonely Place flirts vaguely with witch hunt fears, but certainly not to the extent of Ray's future work. Instead, the film's dark commentary speaks more to a broader revulsion with the studio system and the seedy truth of the city in which Ray earned his keep.

Ray, working with a nominal adaptation of Dorothy Hughes' novel written by Edmund H. North and Andrew Solt, wastes no time establishing Steele's character: in the first scene, he starts that altercation with the driver, insults his manager upon reaching the bar, decks a young director for insulting a has-been movie star, then gets into a fight with the son of a studio chief. His agent (Art Smith) wants him to adapt a book, so Dix picks up the hat-check girl Mildred, who is conveniently engrossed in the novel in question, and takes her back to his place for her to describe the story to him. Her enthusiastic reading only reveals the book's shoddy writing, and Dix sends her home with cab fare. The next morning, cops wake him and inform him that he's the prime suspect in her murder.

Ray barrels through this setup with nary a stolen moment to linger on the juicy dialogue or the immediately arresting performances of the actors. But he also does a fantastic job of establishing moods and then subverting them even in the first 15 minutes. At the police station, Dix's neighbor Laurel (Gloria Grahame), who shared an unspoken connection earlier in the film, testifies that Mildred left his apartment alone; when the police captain presses her, an actress who might just be standing up for Dix to get a part, for why she took such an interest in Steele to monitor him, she responds simply, "I like his face."

That one line catalyzes the film's plot, turning it from a whodunit picture into a mad, doomed romance. Dix returns to his apartment and goes straight to see Laurel. Instead of the usual noir wooing, the two understand they have chemistry and act upon it. In structuring the film this way, Ray begins to undermine established genre tropes even as he uncovers the sad truth behind Hollywood's mores and the tragic arc of celebrity. Laurel is not the scheming, ruinous femme fatale but the catalyst for Steele's artistic rebirth. Under his alcoholic self-loathing he needs a woman to stabilize him and he knows it, and Laurel is one of those people who thinks she can be the one to nurse the wounded creature back to health.

Yes, for all Ray's dark probings around Hollywood, In a Lonely Place is a love story but, as the visual tone and even the title suggest, a happy ending isn't in the cards for this couple. That of course is standard fare for film noir, but even in the genre's murky ambiguity, In a Lonely Place stands out for its twists and turns, as they come not from the plot but from the characters and backdrops. Heck, for all of Ray's unforgiving looks at Hollywood, his greatest and most damning subversion of the Hollywood image stems simply from his casting of Humphrey Bogart.

Bogart gives his finest performance as Steele. The quintessential tough guy, Bogey has always had a tender, vulnerable side to him which made him so perfect for film noir in the first place. Take Casablanca: that is not the story of a tough guy rationing that his love must leave in order to survive, it's the story of a man so heartbroken he can't even bear to hear "their song," an can only just manage to keep himself together on that tarmac at the end. Dixon Steele combines that side of Bogey with the sinister, borderline demonic antihero of The Maltese Falcon: Steele is a wounded soul who needs rehabilitation, but his temper is truly frightening.

Consider Larurel's line, "I like his face." Everyone likes Humphrey Bogart's face. It's too wretched and morose not to make you love it. Just look at that inherently sympathetic face, the put-upon droop of the gravity of fate, a visage that is just trying to stay strong despite a lifetime of heartbreak. Bogey was idolized for that face, but sometimes I feel that its ubiquity has overshadowed its true emotional impact; it's telling that the protagonist of Breathless sees only the toughness of that face, when it is the existential ironies of his unmaking that tie him most closely to Bogey. But that face can quickly becomes unlikable, repulsive even, and it never looked more terrifying here as his temper flares and he comes out of his lonely place to behave strangely, to say the least. While chatting with friends about Mildred's murder, Dix hypothesizes how she might have died. The look of primal hunger on his face as he describes, with increasing passion and lust, his vision of her death is more disturbing even than the devilish sneer on Bogey's face at the end of The Maltese Falcon. The film ends with a scene of horrific violence, one that underlines the tragedy and terror of Bogey's character even as a final tag compounds the heartbreak of the doomed relationship.

At the start of In a Lonely Place, Dix bickers with a rival, responding to insults that he hasn't produced a hit since before the war that the director cares only for commercial success. "You know what you are?" he spits, "A popcorn salesman." Nicholas Ray highlights the truth of the Hollywood machine in plain terms with lines like these and the agent's push for Steele to adapt that trashy thriller, scuffing the sheen of the golden age's image and reminding modern viewers that dispensable, money-grubbing cinema is hardly an outgrowth of the '80s. But In a Lonely Place is not simply an indictment of Hollywood à la The Player but one of the most devastating love stories ever made. Ray is so confident of his technique and the material's complexity and emotional involvement that he telegraphs the end of the film before the third act even begins: as they drive through the city, Dix tells Laurel about a line he thought up for his new screenplay though he doesn't know where to put it: "I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me." One could argue Ray doesn't know where to place it either, as he uses it so early, but in a film this ominous, he can conjure the movie's most tragic utterance without losing an ounce of pain in the climax.

1989 Rewind: Mystery Train

By 1989 and with only three films under his belt, Jim Jarmusch already had an identifiable auteurist stamp: his movies typically followed hipsters, loners and outright foreigners as they silently struggle to make sense of a physically and emotionally deteriorating America. Often, one or more characters identifies with the music of an artist, the camera rarely moves and the comedy is derived from moments of quiet irony and restrained oddity.

Mystery Train certainly contains all of these elements, and it points to future Jarmusch works Coffee and Cigarettes and Night on Earth by introducing several entirely different segments with alternating casts. The title, the name of one of Elvis Presley's most enduring hits, clues us in to what artist will inform the sparse soundtrack, and though the plots and characters change across all three stories, the King remains a constant force, directly or indirectly, throughout the film.

Centered in Memphis, Mystery Train, incidentally Jarusch's first color film, is a step forward not only technologically but thematically. His foreign or at least alienated characters attempted to figure out New York City (Stranger Than Paradise) and, nominally, New Orleans (Down By Law), and Memphis is the last great city of the American cultural mythos to explore -- sure, you can argue Los Angeles for the film industry, but too much of Hollywood's output is product, not art. New York is where foreigners first arrive and where intellectual communities spring up, New Orleans birthed jazz, and Memphis is ground zero for both country and rock 'n' roll. Of the three cities, the brash attitude and the glittering ostentation of Memphis most closely aligns with our postwar cultural mindset; thus, Mystery Train, by dint of its setting, is Jarmusch's most ambitious film yet.

The first vignette, Far From Yokohama, follows a mismatched Japanese couple visiting Memphis to visit Sun Studios. The irrepressibly sunny and chattering Mitsuko obsesses over the King and wants to visit Sun Studios and Graceland, while the stoic and sullen Jun argues for Carl Perkins. They rent a room from a motel that winds up the central location of each segment, managed by a flamboyant maitre d' (Screamin' Jay Hawkins). Jun remarks that Memphis is simply Yokohama with more buildings (echoing a sentiment Eddie expressed over New York and Cleveland in Stranger Than Paradise), and the closest the couple has to a full display of emotion is a heated debate over their respective artists, which is funny because they have a sex scene.

Jarmusch brilliantly layers this sequence to set up the conceit of the entire film: the difficulty of communication between people. That's been Jarmusch's main thrust in his previous features, but never has he explored this theme so thoroughly. Obviously, Mitsuko and Jun experience communication issues with Americans -- in a superb scene, the pair stands bewildered as a Sun Studios guide barrels through a speech she's given endless times; she speaks so quickly that I suspect that Jarmusch played it through the couple's POV as it further stresses how hard she is to understand -- but the key depiction of personal isolation in the vignette occurs between Mitsuko and Jun. Their deep, confrontational love for different artists is less an expression of preference than a representation of their inability to find common ground. Thus, in retrospect, when they momentarily share headphones to listen to the titular song, its a bigger emotional payoff than the sex.

That out-of-the-box approach to the writing defines the other two stories as well. Luisa, an Italian widow, finds herself stranded in Memphis with her husband's casket after her plane breaks down in A Ghost. Jarmusch uses steady tracking shots to follow her around the streets as she looks for a hotel to sleep the night, remaining constantly perpendicular with the character as if taking in the city from the windows of a car. These shots are simultaneously beautiful but emotionally vacant, like a tourist's journey through a city. She eventually reaches the same hotel from the first segment, where she agrees to room with a fast-talking girl named Dee-Dee who ran out on her man so fast she forgot to bring enough cash to rent a room. Dee-Dee never shuts up until she falls asleep, Luisa tells her roommate about her day, but when they part in the morning, the two, who both had suddenly found themselves without their lovers and therefore had something to share, leave without making any sort of connection.

In contrast, the final and most absurdist segment, Lost in Space, turns the stark disconnect between characters in the first two parts into the most open and accessible comedy in a Jarmusch film since the "Ice Cream" scene from Down By Low. Elvis showed up in the second act as a ghost, and Jarmusch reincarnates the King in this segment as the protagonist: Johnny's friends call him Elvis, and casting former Clash frontman Joe Strummer adds another element to the idea of the rebirth of Elvis and, by extension, rock. Elvis, Dee-Dee's boyfriend, lost not only her but his job, so he drinks himself into a suicidal stupor, and it's up to his friend Will Robinson and Dee-Dee's brother-in-law Charlie (Steve Buscemi) to sit on him. The three end up shooting a store clerk and hiding in the motel, where a brooding connection between Charlie and Johnny is hilariously severed when Charlie, who believes himself Johnny's brother-in-law, finds out that Elvis and Dee-Dee never married.

Jarmusch links the vignettes together in a final series of shots that seriously highlights how the characters are as isolated as they were at the start even as Jarmusch indulges in some terrific comedy. Johnny, Charlie and Will hop in their truck and try to sneak out of town and past the cops, despite the fact that the cops aren't even looking for them. The final shot shows them, as well as the characters aboard the train, turns the shot of the heroes riding off into the sunset on its head, and I didn't know whether to reflect on the film at that moment or burst out laughing.

Not a single line is wasted in the sparse dialogue of the film, but what makes Mystery Train even better is the way Jarmusch ties not only the characters and actions of each vignette together but elements from his catalog into the movie. Tom Waits reprises his role as DJ Lee Baby Sims from Down By Law as the voice of the Memphis radio station. Screamin' Jay Hawkins' presence alone is a reference, intentional or not, to Stranger Than Paradise, but when he remarks to an unlucky Charlie, "Boy, you got a curse on you," he's not only foreshadowing future events but coming close to the title of his signature tune "I Put a Spell on You." In that sense, Jarmusch uses Mystery Train to summarize and mark the end of his '80s work, and while I may prefer Down By Law, there's no denying the genius of this film.

The Invention of Lying

Ricky Gervais' first major feature as writer, director and star works with an interesting premise, but the man who created arguably the landmark television program of the decade proves sadly tame when handed a film-sized budget. Together with newcomer Matthew Robinson, he never delivers on his notion of a world where people cannot lie. However, Gervais brings his sense of naturalistic comedy and affecting sentimentality to The Invention of Lying, buoying what in anyone else's hands would have been an abysmal failure.

Gervais plays Mark Bellison, a low-ranking screenwriter for the company Lecture Films. Like the other writers, his scripts are simply condensations of historical events, not performed but recited on-screen by readers. In a world where people can't lie, Mark has it rough: fat, middle-aged and underpaid, his co-workers openly profess their disgust and women ignore him in droves. A friend sets him up on a date with the gorgeous Anna (Jennifer Garner), whom he charms with his humor but has no hope of attracting.

Just as he finds himself out of a job and facing eviction, Mark manages to tell the world's first lie. It's so unprecedented that he can walk into a bank and request whatever amount of money he wants and the tellers assume that, when he overdraws, the computers are simply malfunctioning. After all, whatever he asks for must be in his account. Suddenly, the most pathetic slob in the world has potentially limitless power.

Interestingly, however, Gervais keeps the film subdued, which works both to its credit and detriment. Upon fully realizing what he's now capable of, Mark immediately attempts to pick up a lady for quick sex, but he stops when he understands that what he does qualifies as rape. An American production of the same film would have followed through this bit as a joke, never pausing to let the severity of the situation sink in, but for Gervais to direct the gag into a sober revelation proves that the comedian brings layers and intelligence to his writing. Of course, other aspects of Mark's evolution are fully humorous; he returns to Lecture Films having "discovered" a long lost historical parchment recounting alien visits and interstellar romance. This document even prophesies that Mark will discover it one day and put his antagonistic secretary (Tina Fey) and rival (Rob Lowe) to shame.

About halfway through the film, though, the film splinters into two wildly different movies that never reconcile into a cohesive whole. Now armed with what basically amounts to a superpower, he doubles his efforts to win Anna. It's disappointing that Gervais would steer his premise into rom-com territory, given that no part of a pitch of this movie would suggest it should go down this route. Unwilling to use his gift to dupe Anna into sleeping with him, Mark instead relies on his new-found lateral thinking to charm her. Anna is an underwritten character, constantly sticking to her matter-of-fact desire for genetically ideal children even as she clearly falls for this dope, but Garner makes her work out of sheer charisma: she has one of the most expressive faces in the biz, and she can say entire chunks of dialogue simply with her doe eyes or a lip twitch. The subplot feels too much like Gervais wanted to ease into mainstream, made-for-Americans filmmaking, but anyone who's watched the finale of either The Office or Extras knows his gift for earned emotional payoffs, and at times the romantic aspect of the film is genuinely moving though it stays firmly within stifling genre restrictions.

The other aspect of the film is deeper, darker, funnier and probably would have been the sole focus of Gervais' script had it been part of a television series or a film he never expected to get much attention outside of Britain. The people of this world do not believe in an afterlife, so Mark's mother speaks on her deathbed about her fear of ceasing to exist. To calm her, Mark tearfully spins a vision of heaven to ease him mom's passing. Word gets out, and suddenly people across the world look to Mark for his knowledge of what happens after death. As formulaic and tepid as the subplot involving Mark and Anna is, Gervais makes up for it by openly postulating that religion could only come about through lies. The scenes involving Mark's creation of religion are wickedly satiric, particularly when Mark must endure an exasperating Q&A in response to his commandments.

Elements of these two subplots overlap in places but never in ways more substantive than setup for each other, resulting in meandering stretches in the second half that drag the film. Gervais assembled a cast that rivals all of his acquisitions for Extras combined, including Jonah Hill, Louis C.K., even the great Christopher Guest, but he never does anything with them. Their appearances, even the meatier parts like C.K.'s or Lowe's, feel more like name-recognition cameos than performances. There's also a tenuous logic to the film's premise: people can't lie, yes, but many offer up their true feelings without being asked for it. Gervais, a naturalistic writer and sharp observer of humanity in his television projects, opted for the safe route here -- his next film, Cemetery Junction, reunites him with writing partner Stephen Merchant and sounds from released information like something far more in line with what we know of Gervais' humor -- and as a result it disappoints. Yet Gervais, never trained as an actor, has such a natural presence on-screen and such a real yet inimitable method of delivery that he makes the thing not only watchable but often fun, even outside the raucous first half hour and the biting religious segments. Plus, there's something admirable about a mainstream film that, in a time when a -- according to reports from the Toronto Film Festival -- tame biopic of Charles Darwin can't find a distributor because of controversy, deals with evolution as if it was a fact. Well, a fact that everyone accepts, anyway.

Zombieland

Budget issues clearly affected Ruben Fleischer's Zombieland: for all the talk of a worldwide plague of infected, the streets and cities that characters move through look surprisingly vacant, with only a small portion of zombies in each location, if at all. It's a noticeable flaw, but a slew of gory gags and absurd one-liners make Zombieland a terrific piece of popcorn entertainment, one with more "turn off your brain" fun than almost every blockbuster that came out this summer.

Jesse Eisenberg plays the unnamed protagonist, a virginal college student who survived the mass panic and death by virtue of having no strong ties with anyone, thus preventing him from being tied down. Now that the infection has consumed seemingly everyone else, though, he decides to head to his hometown of Columbus, Ohio to see if his parents survived. Eisenberg dryly narrates the film, ticking off his list of do's-and-don'ts for living in Zombieland like a DIY version of Max Brooks' The Zombie Survival Guide.

Before long he meets "Tallahassee" (Woody Harrelson), a loopy, shotgun-totin' madman scouring the country in search of a Twinkie. Columbus and Tallahassee band together out of an unspoken euphoria at meeting another uninfected human being, though each thoroughly irritates the other. Harrelson is a terrific character actor who excels in off-center roles, and without him Zombieland would be half as fun, if that. He drives his modified SUV on wrecked highways, taking out zombies with relish and finding only the lesser Hostess treats in cleaned-out grocery stores and food trucks.

Eventually, the lads stumble upon a duo of con artist sisters (Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin) who trick them out of their guns and ride. Through a series of predictable events, the quartet winds up together headed to California so Wichita can take her little sister to the amusement park they used to love. Is it a stupid plan? Well, yeah, but there's something delightful about some of the last remaining humans on the planet getting away from their daily struggle for survival in order to ride roller coasters that give the sensation of cheating death.

As with most zombie movies, Zombieland focuses more on the survivors than the undead, but here it works to the film's detriment. Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese's script generally avoids any sense of peril and displays only a scant few moments of reflection and coping; combined with the overall lack of zombie extras, there's a distinct lack of danger in most scenes. In fact, a good portion of the film takes place in a lush Hollywood mansion totally free of a zombie threat.

But the film works, and it works well, because the writers manage to make a post-apocalyptic hellscape into an absurd road movie. When infected do show up, the living dispatch them in creative, over-the-top ways that make for some of the best gory physical comedy this side of Sam Raimi. The fourth wall-breaking narration adds a wry commentary on these grisly dispatches and numerous on-screen cues remind us of Columbus' survival rules as they are put into practice. Furthermore, that extended time in the mansion doesn't kill the momentum like it should as it's predicated on a cameo appearance so unexpected and wild that the scene actually bolsters the movie's energy rather than sap it. And that's nothing compared to the final sequence involving a massive battle at the Californian amusement park, when an appropriate amount of zombies finally show up and the wheels come of the logic train for a bloodbath that plays like a mix of Dawn of the Dead and Looney Tunes.

Zombieland is not a film that will stay with you and make you ask questions. It's as brainless as a zombie victim, and you can see just about every plot point coming a mile away (the people in my audience all joined in loudly whispering what they thought would happen next, and I confess I didn't mind since we were all batted about a .800). But it's buoyed by its sense of peevishness and its fantastic cast, all of whom know what notes to hit and where to alleviate any moment of seriousness with a quick one-liner. An odd entry into the modern slacker canon, Zombieland ultimately posits that, in the event of an apocalypse, the meek shall inherit the earth not because of patience and humility but because the loners, outsiders and slackers won't have to deal with "normal" people anymore.

The Beatles — Let It Be

OK, before you ask, I know that I'm writing this out of order. No, being without any computer for a week and a half did not mess with my agoraphobic brain so much that I can no longer read a timeline properly. I decided to review Let It Be before Abbey Road for two basic reasons: I'm actually keeping with the recording chronology of the band, and it's simply too depressing to end a retrospective of the band with this half-assed send-off. Let me back up: Let It Be is not a bad album, per se; in fact, it's damn fine, but it lacks much of the spark that readily identifies a Beatles album.

That, of course, can be attributed to the lack of the actual band in its construction. After United Artists decided that the largely Beatles-less Yellow Submarine did not count as the group's third and final contracted film, the Fab Four found themselves coerced into a new film project. Around the same time, Paul McCartney concluded that the Beatles needed to get back out and tour again, hoping perhaps that the act of standing on stages together might help to mend the fracturing clearly evident in the White Album sessions. And so, the band planned a televised documentary, entitled Get Back, to chronicle their return to the road. The eponymous single, "Get Back" certainly announced these intentions: a throwback to Buddy Holly/Chuck Berry rock 'n roll, its chorus broke free from McCartney's loopy story and telegraphed a readiness to "get back" to where they once belonged, that place of course being whatever club or stadium would have them.

Naturally, things did not go according to plan. Instead of filming a band going back to basics, the cameras captured the band as it circled the drain, crumbling under the weight of infighting and fatigue. Even George Martin threw his hands up by the end, put out at having to play second fiddle to another engineer and sick of the lads' pettiness. And so, a sound check/recording session on the roof of Abbey Road Studios became not the precursor to a successful tour but the final "show" the band ever played. They abandoned the project, and reconvened a few months later to craft a farewell in the form of Abbey Road. In an attempt to squeeze one final drop out of the band's lucrative well -- this was before compilations of demos and alternate takes were all the rage -- the company sent the tapes of the Get Back sessions to Phil Spector, who set about producing the songs for release as Let It Be without the band's approval.

Spector proves an apt surname, because his presence lingers over the recordings dragging them down considerably. Where George Martin could add layers of arrangements and sonic experimentation over the band's music without losing the fundamental core of the song, Spector bathes the tracks in waves of excess. He turns "The Long and Winding Road," a gentle, gorgeous piano ballad, into the sort of cheesy crossover number that earlier Beatles songs such as "Yesterday" and "Eleanor Rigby" undermined. He applies his Wall of Sound technique to the bluesier numbers as well, but he only makes "One After 909" and "I Me Mine" sound like victims of the "Loudness Wars" decades before producers began shoving everything into the red without a care for balance.

With his input, "Get Back" still encapsulates the spirit of the album, albeit for all the wrong reasons. The song practically had "album opener" stenciled in the grooves of the vinyl upon which it was pressed, yet Spector throws it at the end. It was lean, mean and clever, and it broadcasted the band's "back to basics" ethos. Once a killer declaration of intent, it now stands as a sloppy farewell, an afterthought that still displays a genius despite its mishandling.

Indeed, a number of songs on the album are absolute dynamite. Even the bastardized version of "The Long and Winding Road" is a winner, with Paul's earnest delivery successfully combating the schmaltz of Spector's arrangements without even knowing it. "Across the Universe" is the only song to actually benefit from the producer's technique, its over-the-top orchestration and sonic effects enhancing the psychedelic, upbeat nature of the tune. The highlight, of course, is the lush title track, one of McCartney's greatest ballads and as apt a benediction for the group as "The End" even though it appears halfway through the album here (seriously, who would sequence an album like this?).

In fairness to Phil Spector, he didn't exactly get the Beatles at their prime. "Dig a Pony" and "For You Blue" are some of Lennon and Harrison's weakest compositions, respectively -- the latter is a simplistic blues number that would have stood out as filler on the band's first two albums, much less in the post-Rubber Soul era; that the band accepted this over Harrison's vastly superior numbers "All Things Must Pass" and "Hear Me Lord" is unbelievable. Furthermore, two of the album's tracks, "Dig It" and "Maggie Mae," are not even songs but brief fragments of aborted numbers. "Maggie Mae" actually closes side one after "Let It Be"; wasn't it bad enough that the ballad didn't close the album? They couldn't have at least let it end a side? Of course, Spector and whoever put the album together are responsible for adding such frivolous nonsense.

Though cameras were present to catalog the band's descent, we can glean insight into the band, as ever, from the album artwork. Originally, Get Back was to feature a replication of the band's cover for Please Please Me, a delicious visual representation of their new outlook. Let It Be puts all the lads' photos back on the cover again after being warped in Revolver, surrounded in Sgt. Pepper and completely absent in The Beatles, but the thick framing between the photographs separates each member from one another. Get Back/Let It Be was meant to start a new chapter in the band's history, to rededicate the band to each other and the audiences waiting to see them live. Instead, it saw them slowly pull apart.